The Vital Voice

Whole Foods recently sent a video team out to shoot the goings-on at our Austin farm.  You may know that we’re part of the Whole Foods Local Loan Program, that provides funding to local farmers to help them grow and get their products to market.  We really appreciate their work on the great little video they produced:

http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/2010/03/vital-farms/

Girls On Film

Also – don’t miss our slightly more amateurish effort:  “Hens on Winter Pasture,” on YouTube.  Tell your friends!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6VXwKQZkA

We’re frequently asked by customers why we chose to pack our eggs in PET plastic versus cardboard. By most appearances, plastic, which is a petroleum product, is not as good a choice for an eco-conscious company.

While paper/cardboard is a renewable product, the paper mills that are responsible for their production are some of the worst polluters in the world.

Also, we found that the traditional cardboard egg carton did not protect their precious cargo very well, oftentimes leaving a broken or cracked egg. About 2 years ago, we began the search for the perfect vehicle to carry our hens’ eggs to our customers. We found one company in the world that made egg cartons from 100% recycled PET water bottles. Furthermore, the carton itself was 100% recyclable #1 PET. And, to top it off, due to the design which includes a comfortable air pocket on each end of the egg, these plastic egg cartons better protected our eggs.

According to ABC News, there is a vast area of the Pacific Ocean that has accumulated plastic trash on the surface.

Plastic bottles in a landfill

One such plastic garbage tsunami is said to be more than twice the size of the State of Texas. With a sea of plastic water bottles available, we decided that it would be better to support the market for recycled plastic by using 100% recycled water bottles for our packaging than it would be to support the cutting down and processing of more trees in paper mills in order to use the more politically correct cardboard. Maybe if enough demand for recycled PET plastic is created, someone will harvest the Pacific Ocean plastic for profit (attention young entrepreneurs!).

Since the world won’t be running short on plastic anytime soon, we think the 100% recycled containers we use are the most sustainable choice we can make.

Cheap and tasty, but at what cost?

We really liked Brian Walsh’s article from the August issue of Time magazine, Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food, and feel it’s very relevant to our methods at Vital Farms.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458-1,00.html

In detailing what is mostly pretty grim news, the author provides a litany of the ways in which American food consumers are on the losing end of a pretty sketchy transaction – by ingesting food products that are cheap, but also bring enormous health, environmental, and societal costs. Take the corn industry for example:

But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs. The crop is heavily fertilized — both with chemicals like nitrogen and with subsidies from Washington. Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop — at least until corn ethanol skewed the market — artificially low. That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. “Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” says Gurian-Sherman.

This is especially relevant to the egg industry, as many farms feed their chickens this low-grade, genetically modified, hormone-filled version of corn to their chickens. The resulting eggs are not only uniform and flavorless, but also represent a nutritional compromise for egg eaters.

On our Better Egg page you can read about how pasture-raised hens transfer their natural diet into their eggs in a myriad of ways. We’re proud to say that every Vital Farms egg is produced without using processed or “enhanced” ingredients like GMO corn (or hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, or herbicides). While we’d love for our feed costs to be artificially lowered, that would mean we’d have to reduce the quality of the perfect little super-food our hens produce.