Egg entrepreneurs Josh and Tamsyn Murray were the guests of honour at Matthews Steer’s March Success Stories Breakfast, sharing the story of their award-winning, free-range, ethical egg business.
An unshakable commitment to sustainability in all facets of their business sits at the heart of Josh and Tamsyn Murray’s success story.
Josh started his egg business – Josh’s Rainbow Eggs – at the age of nine, raising chickens on the family’s Macedon Ranges’ property, and selling their eggs to neighbours and at local farmers markets.
As demand for his freshly collected eggs grew, the family approached the local Foodworks supermarket and, because the manager had bought Josh’s eggs at a farmer’s market, she took them on.
The business expanded, first to other rural Foodworks and, following a heartfelt letter from Josh to Coles’ head office, onto that supermarket’s shelves, followed by Woolworths, LaManna and IGA stores.
Josh and Tamsyn’s “well over 20,000 hens” now feed thousands of Victorians weekly with the business donating approximately 4% of the eggs produced to people who need them via their gifting program. This commitment to sharing abundance with their community is just one example of the business’ sustainable approach.
Josh jokes that “therapy” is the secret to making a mother/son business work. “Make no mistake, there was a time where I thought that me and my mother weren’t going to be able to have a functional relationship,” he said. “It’s really difficult (but) I am now very glad that I get this opportunity to spend more time with my mother, I get to do something where I’m contributing, and I’ve also figured out what the business does for me that I care about.”
What Josh cares about is building and sustaining an authentic, ethical business that does “the right thing”, from enabling his hens to live their best lives in spacious paddocks where they can dust bathe, eat grass and bugs and roost, to their egg gifting program, to implementing solar power across their operation.
“I am a product of my generation,” said Josh. “We’re not super-happy as a generation, I’m not super rapt with the situation I’ve been handed here so for me being part of the solution means a tremendous amount to me.
“I don’t see it being worth my time to be disingenuous. It’s important that people are only paying for the eggs, not sacrificing the environment, animal welfare, employee welfare. I don’t want to be a company where people worry about how we’re conducting ourselves.
“I believe Josh’s Rainbow Eggs is a future company in the sense that if we exist 50 years from now, we will be compliant with everything. We are at the forefront of a whole bunch of the issues that face our industry and we’ll be the first to solve them in our industry. All those things mean a tremendous amount to me because I want to wake up every day knowing why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
As an intensive industry, meeting the demand for nutritious, environmentally-friendly chicken feed is one of the business’ biggest challenges. The Josh’s Rainbow Eggs’ team is tackling it head-on, operating at the forefront of agritech innovation by trialling a black soldier fly feed solution that transforms food waste into a nutritious protein source for the hens.
The brutal time commitment demanded by agricultural businesses is another challenge the team has taken steps to address, implementing sound governance practices and installing and a trusted leadership team to ensure the ongoing sustainability of the operation, and to support the business in achieving its one, three and 10-year goals.
“The leadership structure has really changed the way I see the business,” says Tamsyn. “In a farming business it’s 16-hour days, 365 days a year, and you tend to just take it all on because it’s so constant. Having a leadership team gives me hope because it’s a lot of work, and it’s been 10 years of a lot of work. The business is so big now that it’s crazy for me to think I can run it alone.”
From its inception, Josh’s Rainbow Eggs has operated a distribution model built on passionate conviction in the quality of their product, and personal communication of their brand’s value proposition, and that approach holds true today.
The team has solid relationships with the store managers they supply to, those managers have a direct line to Josh and Tamsyn, and Josh still takes time out from university to make deliveries, all of which worked in the business’ favour during recent egg shortages. “The managers know us and had the confidence and trust to reach out to us. It shows the value of having a really resilient supply chain,” said Josh.
This personalised service is faithful to the early days of the business, and the team also maintains a strong connection to its roots by regularly taking the time to stop and look back at where they’ve come from.
“Often you look forward in a business, and the goals and expectations can be tough,” says Tamsyn. “It’s like the horizon, you get there and there’s another goal in the distance. What we’ve been trying to do deeply with our leadership team is look back and show where we’ve come from, how many boxes we’ve sold a week since 2014, to see how much it’s grown and it’s pretty massive.”
Now aged 21, Josh agrees that connection with his business roots is vital to its success. “The business started off as a sustainable company, raising backyard chickens which is an enormous advantage we have,” says Josh. “For us it’s about not compromising as we grow.”
This Easter, Josh’s Rainbow Eggs is producing chocolate rainbow eggs to support the Good Friday Appeal. For every egg sold (produced in collaboration with Chocolatier, and exclusively at Woolworths stores in Victoria) 50c will be donated to the Good Friday Appeal. Learn more.
Contact us if you would like to attend Matthews Steer’s next Success Stories Breakfast.