I turned our family farm's eggs into a £77m brand: How St Ewe became one of Britain's fastest-growing firms

Rebecca ‘Bex’ Tonks has – literally – gone to work on an egg to build her business. 

Thanks to a focus on innovation and sustainability, the 50-year-old has, in two decades, turned a poultry sideline at her family’s dairy farm into a major British food firm – St Ewe Free Range Eggs.

As Tonks puts it, ‘an egg is not just an egg’. It is a top source of protein and offers value and quality at every price point when many households’ budgets are tight. 

A St Ewe egg can cost from 0.32p in a family pack to 0.58p for a deluxe large Rich Yolk egg.

Today St Ewe is still family-owned. But the business, which is based in Truro, Cornwall, employs 140 staff, and it packs and sells 300 million eggs a year. These are laid by the 1.3 million hens that roam the pastures of 55 independent farms.

As a result of the hens’ productivity and Tonks’ entrepreneurial flair, St Ewe was in this year’s league of 100 fastest-growing British firms. 

Over the past three years, sales have risen 88 per cent to £77 million.

Customers include Ocado, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda, but 30 per cent of St Ewe’s output now goes to hotels and restaurants. 

Tonks (pictured) has grown St Ewe into one of Britain's fastest growing firms from her family farm

Top chef Michel Roux is a St Ewe fan and the breakfast menu at London’s swish Langan’s Brasserie proudly proclaims its St Ewe selections, including Eggs Benedict and Eggs Royale.

Tonks took over the farm from her parents Richard and Christine in 2004, having worked as an estate agent and pub manager.

‘Milk wasn’t really paying the bills. So we turned to our free-range hens. At first our eggs went off on a lorry to be packed and sold elsewhere,’ she says.

But in 2007, local farmers’ markets were being set up and interest in ethically-produced eggs was spreading. 

Tonks says: ‘We wanted to know where our products were going. This meant that at first my children were filling the boxes, while my mother and I delivered the eggs to the back door of supermarkets.’

That shift established St Ewe as a brand, especially as Tonks favoured an eye-catching deep blue design for the boxes.

Taking back control of the supply chain also allowed the company to gain what Tonks calls ‘powerful feedback’. She says: ‘We got closer to our customers, which enabled us to understand more about their thinking.’

The move from regional to national operation posed challenges. Tonks says at the outset it could prove tricky to gain the trust of male farmers unaccustomed to dealing with a young female boss. 

She says that these attitudes have now changed. Yet one suspects that Tonks’ conviction that ‘the greater the challenge, the more you long to succeed’ smoothed the process.

Her parents have stepped back, and Justin Cook, the former boss of Muller’s UK and Irish operations, became chairman this summer and Tonks’ son Charles and her sister Jemima have joined the board.

From the early days. St Ewe was self-financing, but it sought the support of its long-time bank HSBC to pay for a new 50,000sq ft grading, processing and packaging plant which opened in 2022. Help also came from the Government’s UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which advanced £3.6 million in a grant administered by Cornwall Council.

The bank also backs the St Ewe academy, an initiative that provides apprenticeships in agricultural and other rural industries – in a location where the young can struggle to get a start in life.

Tonks is a passionate supporter of British agriculture, paying tribute to her suppliers’ ‘unwavering dedication to producing eggs the right way’.

As a nation we consume 14.5 billion eggs a year – an average of 209 each. She deplores a rising number of cheaper imports, especially as an outbreak of salmonella this summer was traced back to such eggs.

‘Just Buy British’ is her plea to anyone contemplating giving hospital patients or anyone else eggs that do not bear the British Lion quality mark.

In growing St Ewe, Tonks says her most important ingredient has always been ‘putting people – and hens – first’.

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