The Egg Quality Program is a major multi-disciplined project that will, on behalf of the Australian Egg Industry, address issues associated with egg quality for the benefit of egg producers and consumers of eggs. The Egg Quality Program is a response to two factors:
- recent consumer market research indicating that consumers are experiencing quality problems with eggs, and
- observations by scientists, industry members and the public of declining egg quality, particularly manifested by albumen runniness (watery whites).
Program Objectives
- To address egg quality and its consistency in line with consumers’ attitudinal and behavioural responses thereby growing the awareness, demand, purchase and consumption of the egg category.
- To provide egg producers and all supply chain partners with the ‘tools’ necessary to be purveyors of quality fresh shell eggs on a consistent basis thereby enhancing the competitiveness of stakeholder businesses.
- To seek a collaborative, whole-of-chain approach to addressing egg quality/consistency issues.
Program Outputs
- Identification of key consumer tolerances of egg characteristics
- Identification of measures to assess a number of egg quality characteristics.
- Identification of key attributes/variables affecting egg quality
- Weighting of all attributes/variables affecting egg quality by assessing impact on egg quality characteristics identified
- Development of a predictive model that takes account of all identified egg quality issues, assesses the impact of each variable and predicts the likely outcome on egg quality
- Targeting of the predictive model towards egg producers and their business in meeting market needs.
- Communication of the egg quality model leading to understanding and adoption of the model among egg businesses.
Current projects
- Influence of supply chain conditions on egg quality, being undertaken by Food Science Australia (FSA), will identify critical issues in the egg supply chain affecting product quality and provide recommendations to the Australian egg industry and its supply chain partners to minimise management practices contributing to a decline in egg quality. The study will include a detailed survey of several egg supply chains representative of the Australian market and the impact of storage and handling practices within each supply chain on shell and interior egg quality. Project duration: 2007-2008
- Egg quality testing and identification of quality risk factors, being undertaken by The University of New England (UNE), is a comprehensive, whole-of-industry egg sampling project that will identify and evaluate risk factors associated with reduced quality in eggs at the point of lay. The study will examine both internal and external parameters of egg quality with a primary focus on the incidence of declining albumen quality within the Australian egg industry. Project duration: 2007-2009