Peckish Acquired, Sonoma Brands Invests in New Owner

An emerging new brand is flying the coop. Snackable egg concept Peckish has been acquired by Egg Innovations in an all stock deal. As part of the transaction, former Peckish owner and creator Sonoma Brands has become an equity holder in Egg Innovations, which also is the owner of the Blue Sky Family Farms line of eggs.

The transaction was completed in August with final execution in November. Peckish VP of Innovation and Brand Lauren Egan will also join Egg Innovations, working remotely from her home in Sonoma, California, leading marketing, innovation and brand positioning for both Peckish and Blue Sky Family Farms.

Launched into stores in 2019, Peckish suffered a massive setback in December 2019 when its co-packer and producer Allmark Foods had to recall all hard-boiled eggs produced at its Gainesville, Georgia, facility due to potential contamination with Listeria monocytogenes. Allmark produced almost every cooked egg in the market, in retail or foodservice, and the recall halted all Peckish sales progress, Egan said. At the time, the line was sold in gyms, Erewhon, Bristol Farms, the Southern Pacific region of Whole Foods Market, and on HungryRoot and Peckish’s own website. It had also just been accepted into Wegmans and Whole Foods’ Northeast region.

While Allmark sorted out the root of the contamination, Egan and her team used the opportunity to retool Peckish’s packaging. The product, which pairs two cooked eggs with a cup of crunchy toppings, now uses less packaging and allows the consumer to see inside the packaging via clear windows. It’s a shift which conveys “freshness,” she said, and helps the product to be more easily understood.

But along with the rebranding, the team also used the time to figure out what a path forward would look like, ultimately deciding that a new owner might help the company scale faster.

“By joining Egg Innovations we have access to best in class sales, marketing, operations, quality assurance, finance — all those things that as a young brand we didn’t necessarily have access to at the time,” Egan said. “Not only that, but Egg Innovations is vertically integrated which enables us to really fast track our operational efficiencies, and for a young brand, that’s huge.”

Because Egg Innovations has a network of family farms it already is working with directly, Peckish has been able to immediately drop its price point $1 to $2, depending on the channel, to an MSRP of $3.49. Along with the pricing, Peckish has also been able to add claims of non-gmo and free-range to its eggs thanks to Egg Innovations’ network. The line recently rolled out in Whole Foods nationwide, Egan said.

Egg Innovations founder and CEO John Brunnquell comes from a long line of farmers, with Brunnquell spinning off the egg arm of the family business into what is now Egg Innovations in the 1990s. Brunnquell still owns 60% of the Indiana-based business, having closed capital from outside investors roughly 18 months ago in order to help the company finance its rapid growth, he said.

The goal with Peckish, Brunnquell said, is to help the company move further into premium and branded products. In terms of consumer facing brands, Egg Innovations previously only had its Blue Sky Family Farm eggs line, which operated within a commoditized section of the store. The move to value-added items is one that other egg brands have also experimented with in the past year, with both Vital Farms and Organic Valley launching cooked egg bites; similarly Handsome Brook Farm, pre-pandemic, had planned to launch an egg-based yogurt called Chikaraka. Meanwhile, eggs as a protein source have become trendy in bars, puffs and even wraps.

“[We recognized] that we weren’t active in the grab and go space and we really didn’t have a product on the burner to go into that space,” Brunnquell said. “So while [Peckish] was very complementary with our lineup of products, it allows us to take our products to an even higher premium and it also allows us to expand the conversation about non-gmo and free range and give some pizzazz to eggs.”

Egg Innovations plans to further expand the line with new egg-based products, with future innovation anticipated for late 2021.

The company is still determining how, or if, the Peckish Brand will integrate with the Blue Sky Family Farms brand via callouts, sub-brands or one central brand name. It’s because of this uncertainty that the company suggested Sonoma Brands take equity in the larger corporation rather than simply retaining some equity in Peckish itself. The partnership will also supply Egg Innovations with a “world class marketer” in the form of Sonoma Brands founder Jon Sebastiani, who will also be a board observer.

“We think we can hold our own on animal welfare and taking care of chickens, but the opportunity to work with John and Sonoma Brands [was appealing],” Brunnquell said. “Now Sonoma Brands can truly straddle the aisle and say ‘let’s look at this very strategically. Does it make sense to keep them separate? Or does it make sense to bring them together a year or two down the road.’”