For years, sustainable food has come with a familiar trade-off: better environmental performance, higher prices at the checkout. A new collaboration in the European egg sector is betting that trade-off no longer needs to exist.

By combining nutrition innovation, farm-level performance data and verified life cycle assessment, the partnership aims to deliver eggs with a significantly lower carbon footprint at the same price as conventional options — shifting sustainability from a niche offering to the default choice on grocery shelves.

dsm-firmenich Animal Nutrition & Health, Hardeman Egg Group and Royal Agrifirm Group have joined forces to establish a new industry benchmark for sustainable egg production. The collaboration brings together feed and nutrition solutions, on-farm performance insights and robust environmental measurement to reduce emissions while maintaining productivity and cost competitiveness.

At the centre of the initiative is dsm-firmenich’s Sustell™ Carbon Value Program, which enables verified, scalable life cycle assessment across the value chain. The partners recently completed a commercial pilot, with results showing more than a 17 per cent reduction in carbon emissions while layer performance exceeded baseline levels.

According to Royal Agrifirm Group, applying the same approach across the roughly 10 billion eggs produced annually in the Netherlands could reduce emissions by approximately 180 million kilograms of CO₂e — equivalent to the yearly energy and gas consumption of around 70,000 households.

The partners say mainstream adoption depends less on consumer willingness to pay more and more on eliminating cost barriers altogether. With price parity, sustainability becomes a default choice rather than a conscious trade-off.

“The biggest impact comes from producing a lower-footprint egg that is attractively priced, ideally at price parity,” said Ton Gielen, CEO of Hardeman Egg Group. “If a consumer sees two cartons at the same price, they’ll pick the verified lower-footprint option and feel they’re helping the environment without paying more.”

Measurement credibility is another critical pillar of the model. dsm-firmenich says accurate, verifiable data at scale is essential to supporting environmental claims that consumers and downstream partners can trust.

The collaboration builds on earlier work between dsm-firmenich and Agrifirm, which connected the Sustell™ life cycle assessment platform with Agrifirm’s PoultryNEXT system to integrate environmental footprinting with farming performance insights.

In 2026, the partners plan to begin expanding the sustainable egg standard to additional companies across the farm and food value chain. The model requires at least three parties committing together to verified emissions reductions while driving efficiencies that keep costs down for consumers.

Hardeman Egg Group operates egg production and processing facilities in the Netherlands, Germany and internationally, producing more than 50 million eggs per week. Royal Agrifirm Group is a global agricultural cooperative focused on developing sustainable food chain solutions. dsm-firmenich Animal Nutrition & Health is a global leader in animal nutrition, health and sustainability solutions.