I hatched a plan to expand my eggs business, now it’s worth £11m

Few people have flattering things to say about the planning departments of local councils, but Rebecca Tonks, the 48-year-old chief executive of St Ewe Free Range Eggs, is one of them.
When she was on a tight deadline to build a packing centre — so she could expand her business to putting about 3.9 million eggs a week into egg boxes — Cornwall council processed the application in just six weeks.
She thinks she got a little lucky with her timing: “They hadn’t got many other planning applications in … it was the middle of Covid. We then built the place in nine months and moved in.”
The site on the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall is now home to both St Ewe’s head office and its newly enlarged packing centre, where the bulk of the company’s 109 employees work, lovingly placing eggs into boxes by hand. Tonks said she could bring in automation to do more of the manual labour, but that this would erode the culture she has worked so hard to cultivate. “There’s a really lovely vibe in the packing centre. It’s like a little community and I don’t want to change that. If we took that away, it could become a bit soulless.”
The move to bigger premises has helped the business to grow, with sales hitting £11.6 million last year, laying a pre-tax profit of £976,000. Tonks said she is proud to be contributing to the local economy. “I’m a Cornish girl and I think it’s very special not just to employ local people but to use all the peripheral services, from our computer experts to hedge trimmers, to surveyors.”
Farming is in Tonks’s blood. She grew up on a dairy farm started by her grandparents just a ten-minute drive from St Ewe’s HQ. In the 1980s, the government introduced a milk quota that imposed a levy on producers’ output above certain limits. The move made the family business unsustainable, so Tonks’s father moved into poultry farming instead.
Within a few years, his firm had a free-range flock of 10,000 birds, selling its eggs to Noble Foods, the UK’s largest egg producer.
In the early 1990s, when she was 17, her father suggested that she took over the business, but she “ran a mile” and opted instead to work in the hospitality industry, running pubs with her first husband. In 2004, “happily divorced” and with two young sons at the time, she felt the pull of the environment in which she had grown up. “Having had a wonderful childhood on the farm, I knew this was where I wanted my children to grow up,” Tonks said.
She and her father took the flock up to 14,000 hens and had a rethink about the business. Until then, they had been one of the 230 poultry farms around the country putting their eggs on a lorry to one of Noble’s packing centres, where they would be graded (by size and shape), packed into boxes and sent to retailers, perhaps under Noble brands such as The Happy Egg Co.
It was frustrating, Tonks said. “We were putting lots of effort into great nutrition for the birds and then sending all the eggs off on a lorry, and had no real idea where they would end up.”
They decided to do it all themselves, setting up their own packing operation — under their own, new, brand name — and selling direct to the supermarkets. “My dad always felt I could sell coal to Newcastle,” she recalled.
They came up with the St Ewe brand, gave Noble 12 months’ notice and bought their own equipment.
But with just two weeks left before the Noble contract expired, Tonks hadn’t signed up a single retailer. “I ended up putting Sainsbury’s on the spot and said, ‘Are you interested or not?’ And they said, ‘Let’s give it a go.’ So we started very locally in Cornwall with our little van. Me and my mum used to go round and deliver [the eggs] to the back doors of Sainsbury’s supermarkets, and off we went.”
As its contracts to supply supermarkets and hospitality outlets grew, Tonks quickly realised she would need to enlist other farmers to help meet the demand. Today, St Ewe has contracts with 49 farms around the country, with more than a million birds laying eggs that are sent to her plant in Cornwall to be boxed and shipped out to retailers.
The farms are each held to the same standards as St Ewe’s own farm in terms of welfare, with the hens all being fed the same to maintain consistency.
Tonks said that making sure the hens are looked after isn’t just the right thing to do, but also makes business sense. “They’re very fragile little creatures, and if you get something wrong, it’s instant. If they’re not very well, that hits your bottom line. So it’s really important to us as a packer to work really closely with our farmers, and with feed suppliers and vets. It’s a combined effort and it involves a lot of communication, but the investment that farmers are putting into welfare and state-of-the-art hen houses today is second to none,” she said.
“You’ve got to keep a hen really calm and chilled out, otherwise you get eggs that are really wrinkly.”
A flock of birds is a considerable investment. Tonks said that to stock a hen house with 32,000 birds, which is typical size for her suppliers, costs £272,000. And it is also expensive to keep them in accommodation where temperature, humidity and air flow are constantly monitored.
Lots of farms today have installed “wind turbines or solar panels on their hen houses to contribute to the running costs of their poultry units,” said Tonks, adding that the government could do more to support the industry. “There has been wider support for other forms of farming, but the poultry sector has never really been supported.” Changes to planning rules to make it easier for farmers to add windows and verandas to existing hen houses would be a good start, she added.
“There needs to be a review of planning laws for farmers because it’s becoming a real challenge. The planning infrastructure is slow and archaic and this is UK-wide. We just can’t get structures up in time for winter. One of my neighbouring [dairy] farms … asked if we have any spare barns, because if he doesn’t find a solution, he’ll have to decrease his herd.”
Tonks, who owns 70 per cent of the business with her parents owning the rest, has only ever tapped external finance once — when she took out an asset-finance agreement to purchase a second-hand egg grader in 2011 for £83,000. “My mum and dad spent months cleaning it with toothbrushes,” she laughed.
As well as their deep-cleaning efforts, Tonks credits her parents with helping to look after her children — she now has three — while she was concentrating on growing the business. “Mum ended up teaching both my boys how to drive. I only had the experience of going out with them once or twice and I remember wearing my riding hat as I was so apprehensive about it.”
She recently hired a nanny for the first time to look after her young daughter while Tonks is tied up at the family firm. But she doesn’t consider going to work a chore, despite the long hours. “I don’t feel like I go to work every day because I enjoy it and work with amazing people.”
She has been supported in the business by Martin Glinski, a former head of operations at Rick Stein’s restaurant group whom she hired as managing director in 2020. “Martin has really driven our growth. He’s a real numbers person and I have lots of ridiculous ideas, so we work very well together,” said Tonks. Her middle son, Charles, aged 23, has been working in arable farming for the past couple of years but will join St Ewe later in the year to help set up a new 32,000-strong hen house.
There aren’t that many female founders and even fewer female farmers, but Tonks said her gender has never held her back. “Perhaps the egg industry has been a bit of an old boys’ club in the past, but things are definitely changing. It’s been fun to watch the brand flourish and I’ve always thought that if we’ve got it right, it’ll work. And if we haven’t got it quite right, it’s not down to whether you’re a man or a woman … you need to go back and sort it out.
I’ve had a couple of old-school farmers who wanted to deal with a man, but that’s their issue, not mine.”
My heroes … my dad, who has never been frightened to try something new — and for an older farmer, that’s quite unusual — and our chairman, Tony Sanders. He’s been part of our business for several years now and he really challenges me to think bigger and think differently.
My best decision … to move from being a producer to packing our own eggs and launching the St Ewe brand.
My worst decision … We’ve launched a highly nutritious egg. They’re called Super Eggs, but we just can’t nail down the branding on it. It’s an ongoing challenge.
Funniest moment… Our hens are very free range — so much so that, a few years ago, one of the hens had decided to roost between the cab and the lorry box. The driver turned up early in the morning and did all his checks, but he didn’t notice the chicken and he drove her an hour and a half up the A30 to collect eggs from one of our farms. He found her when he got there, and put her in the cab for the journey back again.
Best business tip… It doesn’t matter if you’re talking to the king or a farmer — it’s all about communication and people. Never be frightened to talk to people as if you’re friends.