Many innovative food products are born as solutions to problems; Egglife is one of them.
Peggy Johns, a longtime employee of Rose Acre Farms, had some food sensitivities, so she tried re-creating some of her favorite foods in her home kitchen without ingredients like gluten. She shared her ideas with her employer, and Rose Acre Farms assembled a team to commercialize the product.
Rose Acre Farms happens to be the country’s second largest egg producer, so eggs were an obvious and handy ingredient. Early development came a time when gluten-free dieting was on a steep rise, and it (fortuitously) was just at the start of the protein craze.
A protein-packed, low-carb tortilla-like wrap was created; so was a value-added processing business for a commodity company like Rose Acre Farms.
“There’s so much you can do with eggs, so much white space,” says Jihan Miller, vice president of R&D and quality at Egglife Foods, our small-category R&D Team of the Year. “Almost anything you can make with flour you can make with eggs.”
In 2019 Miller -- originally from Colombia and with a background in animal proteins (dairy, meat and eggs) – joined the company, which had existed for about a year as a project within Rose Acre Farms. It hadn’t yet been named Egglife.
Already there were some prototypes for her to sample. With her deep knowledge and expertise in egg science and processing, Miller was instrumental in scaling and commercializing the recipe that Johns had developed in her kitchen, and Egglife as a stand-alone business was formed.
“Our first facility was in a garage in a corn field outside of someone’s house,” Miller recalls. Later in 2019, Egglife moved into its own building in tiny Wolcott, Ind., not far from Rose Acre’s hen houses. The first commercial products were produced at the end of 2019, and Egglife wraps have grown to 14,000 stores in 50 states since and last month entered Canada.
“Now we have a lab, benchtop testing, some processing equipment, a pilot plant,” she says. The plant in Wolcott has two commercial lines for producing the wraps, which currently come in original (plain), garden salsa, everything bagel, southwest and sweet cinnamon. Roasted garlic and herb, just launched.
The typical front-pack statement is attractive: less than 1g carbs, 5g protein, less than 35 calories and zero sugar. They also are dairy-free, keto-approved and made from cage-free eggs. Eggs rank high among protein-rich foods, and they are complete proteins, containing all the nine essential amino acids that the body cannot make on its own.
Egglife wraps can be used in any application consumers would use a flour wrap or tortilla: tacos, bagel dogs, pinwheels, wrap sandwiches, personal pizza -- or, with that one sweet variety, a crepe. The website -- www.egglifefoods.com – claims 150 different “culinary creations” that can be made with egg wraps. They’re fully cooked and ready to eat, so they can be served cold, straight out of the package, or warmed up.
“The formulation is constantly evolving,” Miller says. “The formula back in 2019 isn’t the same one we use today.” Not only were refinements made for taste and texture but also to accommodate the needs of processing. And the new flavors. The process is patented.
The R&D team at Egglife includes an R&D manager, four food scientists, a process engineer, two technicians. Being 25 miles from West Lafayette, Ind., Egglife also leans on the food science and engineering departments at Purdue University. The marketing team is in Chicago.
The cross-functional Egglife team meets weekly, sometimes more often if a project is in the works. Miller says their unique product development process is a hybrid of stage-gate and agile. “It keeps us structured but also enables us to move fast when we see an opportunity.”
There are many potential tangents for egg whites and wraps “although we do have guardrails,” says Miller. Clean label is first and foremost, followed by low carbs and high protein. Within those guardrails – and with eggs always at the center -- ideas can come from or take products anywhere. The company expends great effort to listen to consumer ideas.
With a lot of trade secrets and unique technologies, Egglife manufactures its own products – no co-manufacturers are used. As a result, “We work closely with our equipment suppliers to alter machines for our unique needs,” she says.
For now, egg white wraps is the only product Egglife produces. But Miller hints that next year the company will enter a new product category, “a logical extension of what we’ve already done,” while staying close to the company motto of “simple, delicious, nutritious.”
Read about our other R&D Team: T. (as in Team) Marzetti.
