AN AWARD-WINNING food shop and cafe will celebrate its best-selling product on Easter Saturday.

Ian Taylor Free Range Eggs have been one of Fodder’s greatest success stories since it opened at the Great Yorkshire Showground, in Harrogate, almost five years ago.

The shop has given a huge boost to his business and has become his biggest customer, about to sell its 100,000th box of six eggs.

Those 600,000 eggs are in addition to the hundreds of thousands used in Fodder’s kitchen in products such as quiches, cakes and sandwiches.

To celebrate the milestone, Mr Taylor will paint a single egg gold and put a congratulatory message in the box for whoever buys it. The winning egg will be among those delivered in the week beginning April 21 and the owner will receive £50 of vouchers to spend in Fodder.

On Easter Saturday from 11am to 2pm, Mr Taylor will be at Fodder with some of his hens, as part of the shop’s Easter Eggstravaganza.

The eggs, laid on his family farm at Burton Leonard, near Harrogate, still sell at 99p for half-a-dozen medium-sized – the same price as when Fodder opened. Half a dozen large eggs are the shop’s best-selling product, and Ian has recently introduced Extra Large, which he says is “the fillet steak of the egg world”.

Mr Taylor, 37, was five when his parents, Lesley and John, gave him half-a-dozen hens to look after. He became fascinated by them and his flock kept growing. By the time he was in his teens, he was selling eggs around Burton Leonard from his bicycle.

“I asked a lad on the school bus if his mum wanted any eggs, and she asked everyone in the village, so it suddenly snowballed, and I was selling 30 dozen a week just on my pushbike in the village,” he said.

“By the time I left school, I probably had 300 hens. Soon after, that figure doubled. I didn’t know the egg business was going to take off, it was just like a hobby.”

After studying animal husbandry at Askham Bryan College, he went into business aged 20, with the help of a £1,500 grant and an interestfree loan from the Prince’s Trust.

Mr Taylor has never looked back. He now has 14,000 hens of his own, and takes eggs on a contract basis from a further 9,000, which come into his farm to be graded and packed.

All the hens have complete freedom to roam outside, and are fed a premium diet to ensure their eggs are of the highest quality – and have the golden-coloured yolk that is their trademark.

The 23,000 hens lay 144,000 free range eggs a week.

Mr Taylor and his partner, Rita, work seven days a week, putting in more than 80 hours. His parents also help in the business.

Mr Taylor has worked out that across those 80 hours, his hens are producing a box of half-a-dozen eggs approximately every ten seconds.

All the eggs are packed within three days of laying. The packing machine can handle 30,000 an hour and 90 per cent of the eggs are delivered personally by Mr Taylor to a network of independent retailers, restaurants and hotels across North and West Yorkshire.