COLOUR PROBLEM Odd Preference For Brown Eggs

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30399, 25 March 1964, Page 2

COLOUR PROBLEM Odd Preference For Brown Eggs

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.J

LONDON, March 24.

The British housewife’s preference for the brown egg is to be investigated.

A firm in Yorkshire which last year hatched 32 million chickens for egg production is forming its own market research department; one of the first problems it will have to tackle is which came first in order of preference: the chicken or the egg. This, says the “Guardian,” is because of the British poultry farmer’s equally baffling preference for the pullet which lays brown eggs when he knows that it is about 10 per cent less profitable than the pullet which lays white eggs. Some members of the firm feel that Britain’s delight in the brown egg may have been

conditioned by production, since the United States is generally a white egg country and the German housewife is supposed to insist on the white egg because it looks clinically clean. They point out that their firm sells three and a half times more layers of brown eggs than the layers of white eggs, and claim that a third of the eggs in Britain are produced by brown layers. On the other hand they concede that the New England part of the United States prefers brown eggs and that at least one British supermarket claims there is a sales resistance to packs of six eggs containing more than three which are white.

The head of the firm put 12 scientists to the test and found that the 11 who were British chose brown eggs when offered some to take home.

The twelfth man—an American—chose white.

This year the firm, assuming that the Briitsh housewife does not want a white egg, is introducing for the farmer’s benefit a strain of bird which will be more profitable than the brown layer

because it will lay as many eggs as the white layer, but less profitable than the white layer because it will have the brown layer’s appetite. .