'Freerange' sales still growing

 Consumer demand for freerange eggs has been increasing all over the world and Australia is no exception.

Shoppers in this country bought 525 million dozen eggs in 1920/21 and for the first time more than 50% were labelled as freerange. Sounds great, but most people buy eggs in supermarkets which only stock eggs from intensive production systems.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission made a great attempt to stamp out the practice of egg substitution by obtaining convictions in the Federal Court for deceptive practices. Several penalties for $300,000 were imposed and one totalled $1,000,000 including costs. However, profits are so large that all those operators are still in business. The reality is that by doing nothing but simply adding the words ‘free range’ to their labels can boost each company's net profit by around $2.5 million a year, So. For them, paying occasional fines is just another cost of doing business.In its various judgments, the Federal Court found that to be clasasified as freerange, hens must be allowed to move freely on an open range and not confined to barns.