PACKAGING TECHNOLOGY MATT REYNOLDS |
EDITOR PACKAGING WORLD
Café Egg Bites Hit Retail Shelves The new retail pack for Vital Farms egg bites allows for in-pack baking in CPET trays at the production facility. Consumers simply microwave the MAP trays at home.
P
RIOR TO THE PANDEMIC, a new breakfast trend had been sweeping the U.S. Popularized by major café chains in quick service or foodservice settings, sous vide-cooked egg bites containing classic but elevated ingredient pairings were quickly becoming a breakfast staple for busy café patrons on their way into the office in the morning. The pandemic temporarily disrupted the foodservice category, but the secret was out about sous vide egg bites. Keenly watching this trend unfold was Vital Farms, which offers a range of pasture-raised foods nationwide. The company was founded in 2007 by husband and wife Matt and Catherine O’Hayer with 20 Rhode Island Red hens, a 27-acre plot of pasture in Austin, Texas, and an unwavering commitment to animal welfare. By volume, the company is now the No. 1 pasture-raised egg brand in the U.S. and the No. 2 egg brand overall. Vital Farms initially made its name as a shell egg company. A few years after its founding, Vital Farms broadened its brand to new categories. “We now have several products that are extensions of our shell egg business, including hardboiled eggs, liquid eggs, and our newer convenient breakfast products Egg Bites and Breakfast Bars,”
PHOTO COURTESY OF VITAL FARMS
Vital Farms’ Egg Bites use a unique packaging and processing approach, baking the product in pack prior to MAP sealing. 20
PROFOOD WORLD
1221_PackagingTech.indd 20
|
December 2021
|
says Jermaine Harvey, director of contract manufacturing for Vital Farms. Vital Farms was early to throw its hat into the egg-bite ring, based on the belief that it had a secret weapon—a higher-quality egg bite made with the ethically sourced ingredients for which Vital Farms is known. And while foodservice hatched the egg bite trend, an opportunity to crack the retail space was there for the taking. Vital Farms already had deep connections with like-minded retailers, including Whole Foods Market. From that confluence of trends and events, Vital Farms’ Pasture-Raised Egg Bites were born. Every pack comes with two egg bites, has 16 to 18 g of protein per serving, and is ready to eat after just 45 seconds in the microwave. Available in four flavor combinations, the single-serve refrigerated egg bites are certified gluten-free and packaged in microwavable, recyclable, BPA-free packaging.
Out-of-the-shell thinking The café-popularized blueprint for egg bites uses a cooking technique called sous vide. Using this method, the raw ingredients are vacuum sealed together in a thin film, then suspended in a liquid solution that’s kept at a precisely controlled temperature as the product cooks. This means vacuum packing and sous vide processing of the egg bites would occur first. Then, the cooked product would be cooled, the film removed, and the bites flash frozen in ensuing steps. Only after freezing would the finished bites be packaged and refrigerated for grab-and-go using gas-flush modified atmosphere packaging (MAP). But in a bid to create some market differentiation, Vital Farms decided to create a baked product that looked more homestyle, while consolidating the processing and packaging steps by baking in-pack rather than processing, then packaging. And since they’d be baking in the pack at the production facility, couldn’t the pack also withstand a microwave in the consumer’s home? And finally, could in-pack baking, instead of sous vide, provide
www.profoodworld.com
11/23/21 6:39 PM
