Revolutionising the way we think about food – and our planet.

Becoming carbon neutral can be a hard egg to crack, but with some respectful thinking, eco-friendly white hens and innovative technology, we’ve broken the shell.

From farm to shelf, we’ve made a commitment to our planet and pledged to reduce our carbon foodprint, producing the UK’s first carbon neutral egg. Food production is responsible for ¼ of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.[1] Becoming aware of the environmental consequences of food production is the initial step and doing better moving forward is the next.

We are offering you the ability to make a big impact with a small purchase of a humble egg – that delicious little food staple that lingers in nearly every kitchen up and down the country.

Working with Climate Partner, we have reviewed and scrutinised the production life cycle of a Respectful egg, pioneering the process and paving the way for eggs that won’t cost the Earth.

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our times. For us, de-carbonising and becoming carbon neutral is the start of our journey – it’s our story for today. The future? Well, we’re striving for a more respectful one, with sustainable farming practices implemented for future generations. We share the sentiment of our friends at Climate Partner, carbon neutral is a goal for today, net zero is a goal for tomorrow.

Before both the chicken and the egg, came our planet.

[1] Hannah Ritchie, Our World in Data, University of Oxford.

Moving towards a sustainable future and using as much renewable energy as we can is in our Respectful DNA. Although it sometimes doesn’t feel like it in Britain – particularly in the summertime, sunlight is one of our planet’s most abundant and freely available energy resources. So, we’ve mounted solar panels across our farm, including on the roofs of hen houses and sheds, to soak up the glorious rays.

We care about clean energy at Respectful. Both our farm and our packing centre use renewable energy from our own solar array. We recognise it’s a difficult ‘weather dependent’ journey, but we’re taking important steps in the right direction.

We are so proud to say that we are doing something rather extraordinary when it comes to feeding our wholesome hens – we have completely removed soya from their feed and replaced with homegrown, nutritious field beans from our farm.

With soya being the biggest single contributor of carbon when producing feed for hens, the removal of this source of protein, which the global food industry has become heavily reliant on, makes a genuinely significant difference to the environment. Soya is also intrinsically linked to deforestation and its rapid growth has come at a huge cost to the Amazon.

By carefully curating a delicious local diet for our beautiful, eco-friendly white hens, including protein alternatives such as lupins, munga beans and peas, we are making a staggering 50% reduction in CO2 emissions alone versus a standard brown laying bird on a soya diet. This is something to celebrate, plus it supports our love for all things local. We also have our own mill on our farm to prepare the local wheat we use in our girls’ diets. Again, this removes some unnecessary food miles.

Like our hens, we are always on the scavenge for the best food – for both our bellies and the planet – so, we are constantly looking for ways to improve it.

Forests are the lungs of our planet, and we care about breathing a little easier at Respectful. We’re working hard, not only on our farm, but across our supply chain to eliminate deforestation.

Our lush local feed that we produce for our hens is a big part of our deforestation journey. Most soya comes from South America and the growth of its production over the last 20 years has been nothing short of meteoric. So, by removing it from our hens’ diets we are helping to protect the Amazon rainforest.

We’d love to say that we have removed carbon completely from our egg production, which is almost the case, but we do have a small percentage leftover that we carefully offset and is a rather poignant and ‘full circle’ celebration of our deforestation journey.

With a little help from our friends at Climate Partner, who have independently verified and monitored our path to carbon neutrality, we’ve made a commitment to some very important carbon offset projects in South America – the very region that is most impacted by deforestation for soya production.

So, in an eggshell, we’re treading lightly by respectfully removing soya from our feed and not directly impacting the Amazon basin, but also protecting the forest in a region in desperate need of our help as they are heavily vulnerable to soya production.

Being mindful and making respectful choices is at the heart of everything we do, however sometimes a firm no is necessary. Genetically modified crops are a big ‘no no’ for us.

For farmers, GMO crops cause a variety of difficulties, such as ‘superweeds’ and ‘superbugs,’ which are incredibly tricky to manage and need increasingly toxic poisons to eradicate. Once released into our environment, it’s impossible to recall these ‘chemical creations.’

What can we say? We like our crops to be produced on farms, not in a lab. We are lovers of the land, working with the land, listening to nature and soothing the world.

Our wholesome, white-feathered hens, who we affectionally call our ‘eco-friendly girls’, are instinctively environmentally minded and super-efficient birds. They are significantly more productive than standard brown birds, and not too demanding. As a result, they naturally lower their carbon footprint – just by being themselves – which is rather extraordinary!

With a natural, free-roaming life on our lush farm, they quite literally have the pick of our locally grown crops. Their petite stature means they have a smaller appetite than their brown-feathered friends, meaning they have a smaller impact on our planet in terms of the carbon emissions required to produce their feed.

They may be small, but they are respectfully mighty!