Posted on Wed, Mar. 24, 2004


Gold Circle Farms lab technician Tanis Klecker inspects eggs at a Boulder, Colo., facility. The egg producer sells a cage-free, omega-3, all-vegetarian-feed egg.

Yolk medicine

Designer eggs touting benefits lay claim to greater market share

By Katy Mclaughlin, The Wall Street Journal

link to article

There are designer shoes, designer sheets and even designer teapots. And now for breakfast, cooks can scramble up some designer eggs.

In an effort to capitalize on the latest fashions in healthy-sounding foods, companies are rolling out new types of eggs that make a range of health claims not usually associated with omelets.

The new products, often referred to as designer eggs, include "omega-3" varieties that come from chickens raised on special feed that sharply boost their eggs' content of heart-healthy fatty acids. There are lower-cholesterol eggs and organic eggs. There are even "vegetarian" eggs, which come from chickens that aren't fed any animal products, and "cage-free" eggs. The latter are produced by birds that live within the walls of a barn but not in individual cages.

Some brands layer multiple weighty attributes onto their eggs. Gold Circle Farms, for example, sells a cage-free, omega-3, all-vegetarian-feed egg that has six times as much vitamin E as the average egg.

Despite the fact that specialty eggs usually cost $1 to $3 more per dozen than regular eggs, they are selling briskly. Eggland's Best, based in King of Prussia, Pa. -- which sells a patented lower-cholesterol egg -- says sales rose 26 percent last year to about $120 million. Egg Innovations, a Port Washington, Wis., company that sells a variety of designer eggs, from organic to vegetarian to omega-3, says sales are up by half from last year. Designer eggs now account for roughly 5 percent of the total egg market, up from about 3 percent five years ago, according to the Egg Nutrition Center, a division of the National Egg Board, a trade group for producers.

It's happening at a time when conventional-egg prices are already as high as they've been for two decades -- averaging $1.57 a dozen in January, the most recent month for which data are available, up from $1.18 a year earlier. The price increase stems in part from increased demand driven by the popularity of high-protein diets like Atkins.

With their high-tech-looking plastic containers stamped with lots of health information, the new designer eggs may make shoppers accustomed to simply grabbing a foam package of generic Grade A's think they've wandered into the pharmacy section of the supermarket. Gold Circle Farms, for example, says three to four of its DHA Omega-3 eggs contain as much heart-healthy fatty acid as 3 ounces of salmon. Eggland's Best eggs are marketed as being 16 percent lower in cholesterol and 25 percent lower in saturated fat than conventional eggs and packed with vitamin E, iodine and lutein.

Still, some health groups, including the American Dietetic Association and the American Heart Association, say the newfangled eggs aren't all they're cracked up to be. One concern is that consumers on a budget will waste their money on the eggs, thinking they provide a bigger nutritional punch than they actually do. A more serious worry is that consumers might think that the eggs can replace foods such as fish and vegetables in the diet. For example, the Web site of Gold Circle Farms, a unit of Hidden Villa Ranch in Fullerton, Calif., includes a press release that advises consumers to, "Skip the Fish. Get Your DHA Omega-3 in an Egg."

"It's a nice marketing strategy," says Roberta Anding, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. However, "I would probably say you're not going to get enough payback" nutritionally for the extra cost of the eggs, she says. Although designer eggs are being marketed as a breakthrough source of omega-3 fatty acids, a nutrient that has gotten a lot of attention because research has shown it can protect against heart attacks and strokes, the American Heart Association hasn't changed its stance on eggs at all since designer eggs' invention.

"If I were recommending someone increase omega-3 fatty acids, I would recommend they consume fish," says Alice Lichtenstein, vice chairwoman of the nutrition committee at the American Heart Association. That's because to get the same amount of long-chain omega-3s as in a 6-ounce serving of salmon, you would have to eat an omelet made with 11 omega-3 eggs -- which would mean consuming nearly eight times as much cholesterol as the American Heart Association recommends per day.

The current popularity of eggs reflects a dramatic change from previous decades when many Americans stopped eating them out of fear of high cholesterol. Part of the reason for the shift is that after decades of recommending that people eat no more than three egg yolks a week, the American Heart Association published guidelines in 2000 saying that a person could eat an egg a day without affecting blood cholesterol levels.

Designer-egg skeptics say that a diet that includes fish and a variety of vegetables provides plenty of omega-3s, lutein and vitamin E and makes the newfangled eggs unnecessary.