| | | Feeding Chickens Stale Bread and Unsold Cookies for Zero-Carbon Eggs
Dutch egg producer Kipster cuts emissions by replacing the fresh grains hens consume with leftovers humans won’t eat.
A Kipster farm in the Netherlands.
Source: Kipster
In the mid-aughts, Ruud Zanders was running a company with more than $40 million in annual sales from 1 million hens across Europe laying hundreds of millions of eggs a year. But a combination of overleveraging, the credit crunch that foretold the Great Recession and an outbreak of avian influenza cost him his farm and his home. “We could have survived any one of these, but not all three,” Zanders says.
As he struggled to get back on his feet, Zanders sought a more sustainable way to produce eggs—something that would benefit people, birds and the environment. He came across research advocating a shift away from feeding animals with corn and other grains that humans might otherwise eat. Almost a third of the world’s grain is used as fodder for livestock. What if he could give laying hens food waste instead?
Global Grain Supply2020
Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
For Zanders, the idea triggered memories of his parents’ description of their childhood just after World War II. The family collected leftovers to fatten up a pig they later butchered and turned into bacon, ham and pork roast. “My mother was always saying, ‘We didn’t have enough money to buy food,’ ” Zanders recalls. “So they were using the land as good as possible to instead make food.”
In 2017, Zanders’s company, Kipster (kip means chicken in Dutch), started producing eggs from hens fed with wasted food: bread past its expiration date, unsold crackers and—this being the Netherlands—stale stroopwafels, the country’s signature caramel-filled cookies. Zanders came up with a barn design that stands in sharp contrast to the windowless, rectangular, aluminum-clad sheds common across the Netherlands and the American Midwest. A ventilation system adapted from parking garages cuts dangerous accumulations of ammonia and particulate matter by more than 70%. Solar panels cover the gently sloped, south-facing roof. The north-facing front is glass—allowing natural light to flood the chickens’ living area without overheating. And the birds roam freely, roosting on simulated trees made from two-by-fours and pecking at logs and branches.
A Kipster solar-paneled farm structure.
Source: Kipster
It took years for Kipster to figure out how to produce chicken feed from the human food-waste stream as finding the right combination of leftovers that provide the nutrition hens require proved complicated. Unsold bread and cookies are combined with manufacturers’ processing failures and test runs at a mill near the German border that had been making similar products for pigs for decades. But pigs will eat pretty much anything. Laying hens are pickier.
The grains consumed by animals later eaten by humans could nourish far more people than the meat those animals produce, according to Hannah van Zanten, a professor of farming ecology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who’s advised Zanders. “If we don’t feed livestock with grains anymore, but only with leftovers, the environmental impact will go down,” she says. The carbon footprint of Kipster’s feed is less than half that of the traditional stuff, the company says, but because of the complexity of collection it costs slightly more. Kipster’s eggs aren’t organic, because the food waste isn’t so certified, but they do sell for about 10% less (though they’re roughly 50% more than the cheapest mass-market eggs).
Kipster chickens.
Source: Kipster
The farm’s design also helps reduce the likelihood of diseases jumping from animals to humans, according to Thijs Kuiken, a pathologist at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam—a growing concern as avian influenza risks becoming endemic in Europe. Although the hens are less densely packed than in most intensive poultry operations, they have less outdoor space, reducing the chances that they’ll be infected by feces dropped by passing wild birds. Kipster received the highest rating from Beter Leven, a Dutch animal welfare certification agency.
In 2021 the company announced plans to license its system to Kroger Co., the top US grocery chain. A Kroger supplier in Indiana, MPS Egg Farms, adopted it—slanted barn roofs and all—and its first Kipster eggs hit the shelves a few weeks ago. Four US barns will soon be in operation, according to Kipster, and the company is in talks to license its system to producers in Belgium, France and the UK for production by yearend.
The downside? There probably aren’t enough leftovers available to feed all of the world’s livestock. So achieving further meaningful reductions in carbon emissions from agriculture will require people to get more protein from plants and less from animals. And that, Zanders says, probably even means cutting egg consumption. “It may sound strange coming from a poultry farmer,” he says, “but we need to eat fewer eggs.”
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