Bowler’s Eggs joins Free Range Egg Association

The British Free-Range Egg Producers Association (BFREPA) has announced that the John Bowler Eggs franchise has joined the organisation, propelling its membership up to 67% of the free-range layers sector.

“We need to speak with the strongest united voice possible,” said BFREPA chairman John Retson. “These are very difficult times for free-range egg producers. They really have been feeling the squeeze because there are just too many eggs on the market. The more producers we represent, the stronger our voice will be.”

Bowler’s started in 1980 and is the biggest free-range egg franchise operation in the United Kingdom, with more than 2.5 million hens producing eggs on about 170 contract farms.

“We felt that it would be in the best interests of producers for us to join forces with BFREPA,” said finance director at John Bowler Eggs, Colin Shed. “We have been going through this period of oversupply and producers have been suffering as a result of over-expansion.

“It is in the interests of producers that they have a representative body that seeks to unite all producers with a view to possibly preventing this happening again in the future and I think we at Bowler’s can help.”

BFREPA now represents producers with 10.1m birds in production, or almost 70% of the industry. But Mr Retson hopes to see this figure rise even further to 80% of the free-range flock.

He also warned that next year presents some of the toughest challenges for the free-range sector, with the lax enforcement of the impending ban on conventional cages allowing “illegal eggs”, produced in conventional cages, to compete with higher welfare British produce.

“January, February and March next year could possibly be critical. We need to protect our industry and, hopefully, a stronger BFREPA may help to do that.”

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