We are in a slow week in Latin America and all other Catholic countries – the Holy Week, right before Easter Week. Most people take Thursday and Friday off. However, I thought I could still blog about poultry!
This time I choose hard-boiled eggs. It might not be the most wonderful, sophisticated dish in the world, but it has a certain versatility. I eat it once in a while plain with mayonnaise, in pieces or slices in a salad or chopped on top of the wonderful Spanish cold soup salmorejo.
However, even though it is easy to prepare and consume, it seems to me that hard-boiled eggs are hard to market.
Some years ago, a well-known Mexican egg producer launched a hard-boiled egg product in convenience stores in one city in the central part of the country. If I am not wrong, the pack came with two ready-to-eat hard boiled eggs with a sachet of salt and powdered hot pepper (of course, in Mexico!). I thought the idea was brilliant, considering it is such a nutritious food, in a country like Mexico riddled with junk food.
I might be wrong, but the product ended up not succeeding.
A few days ago, a Chilean egg producer also told me of a similar product launched in Chile. It came in a well-designed 6-egg package, but he told me the “consumer did not understand it, did not catch the idea.” So, the company discontinued it. Apparently, the consumer was comparing the price of the fresh eggs with the hard-boiled eggs and were not willing to pay for the value-added.
And that is exactly what attracted my attention. How come the consumer never compares the price of fresh potatoes with potato chips? Because if they would do that, they would probably end up not buying chips, “or buying a potato farm” as the Chilean producer told me.
Ready-to-eat hard-boiled eggs for salads seem to work better, although it is a very small segment of the egg products market.
Maybe we need to do something else about it.
What do you think?
