It is 11 am, since every day, the chopsticks of an open building and 6,000 chickens led by Red are laughing pecking in their five hectares of trees meadow. A model acclaimed in theory by the French but complex to generalize against the whims of demand.
Inside, Lucas Corbin, 22, classified with an expert hand, the eggs that still arrive hot from the nests on a carpet and that will be stamped of a rouge label, that is, with a more demanding specifications than the full (code 1) on the size of the farm, its density, the accessible course for animals and their foods.
“This is what I have always known, chickens outside, respectful methods,” he said. His father, from which he will resume the exploitation located in northern Le Mans in a few years, was the fourteenth breeder of the rented farmers cooperative to embark on the eggs labeled in the late 1980s.
“We were at the top of the chickens of the cage, for health reasons. Putting chickens outside was unimaginable,” says Martine Cottin, veterinary manager of the cooperative. Today, the cooperative has 330 peeled farms and has a waiting list of about twenty breeders ready to settle or grow, rare in an agricultural world that struggles to renew its generations. “We have a good image. We are local, everyone here knows someone from Loué,” says Martine Cottin.
15 billion eggs every year
Typical profile of pending breeders: cereal trees that seek to stabilize their income or women of operators who wish to “return to the farm” with their own activity. The Cooperative intends to participate in its level in the construction of 300 new chicken cooperatives by 2030, as provided in the plan of the sector to meet the growing demand for French eggs.
But Philippe Gélin, president of the LDC Group, who packs and markets the praised eggs (organic and red label), warns that it is necessary to “be sure, before installing new breeders, that the application will be there.”
France produces around 15 billion eggs per year, or 226 eggs consumed per capita in 2024 against 200 ten years ago. Almost seven billion were bought by homes in 2024. This part has increased by more than 300 million additional eggs per year in recent years, which sometimes creates supply tensions on the shelves of supermarkets.
But demand is not homogeneous. Currently, almost half of the eggs sold in the store in France are “complete” (45%) and 16% organic or red label. Reproduction modes without access to the outside represent almost 40%: 19% for ground chickens and 18% in cage. With the inflation of 2022, the consumption of organic eggs and the red label, which cost four times to produce than the chicken egg cage, while it had reached its maximum point in 2019-2020.
The recovery in recent months is shy and organic players disturb budget cuts in envelopes dedicated to the maintenance or installation of organic farmers and public funds dedicated to promoting consumption. At the same time, the demand for outdoor eggs without label and eggs in the floor on the ground, without access to the outside, is experiencing a two -digit growth, to the detriment of the cages.
Avoid the use of imports
After having invested 16 million euros in its packaging center in 2019 to pack and draw precisely up to 120,000 eggs per hour, LDC decided to diversify its offer. In mid -2022, in full explosion in inflation, the group occupies the morning, 60% comes from cage chickens, a model denounced by NGOs and that the sector is committed to abandoning. Today, of the 500 breeders that supply LDC, five still practice cage chickens and represent 10% of the 1,300 million “peel” eggs sold by the group in 2024.
The objective is to reach zero by 2027, perhaps before if the increase in the demand for eggs does not delay transitions, the priority for the sector is to avoid the use of imports after the scandal caused at the end of August by the presence in some French supermarkets of Ukrainian eggs, which potentially contain prohibited antibiotics in the European Union.
Source: BFM TV
