Downtown Frankfurt, Hauptwache
It’s Tuesday, April 12th, and Easter is just around the corner. The shops are packed with eggs – Easter eggs for the most part – and the showcases are decorated with all kinds of springtime knick-knacks to put customers in the right mood. Amidst the season’s shopping buzz stands an ordinary, yet extraordinary, vending machine dispensing eggs – fresh eggs from live chickens: “The Egg Machine!”

The Egg Machine attracts people, who end up completely amazed in front of it mumbling:
“Gee whiz…those are real chickens inside that machine!” Little kids ask incredulously: “Dad, are those real?” Real they are, indeed: sixteen live hens in full glory. A friendly organic farmer lent them to us for a couple of hours. He did so with quite a clear conscience, since his feathered friends were entirely kept out of harm’s way. Their veterinarily supervised dwelling in the converted vending machine even serves a noble cause: creating awareness for the utterly devastating living conditions of their fellow hens in laying batteries, and thus persuading the customers to buy eggs that are only produced in humane husbandry.

Even though to all passers-by’s astonishment, the whole set-up appears just like a genuine vending machine, one could not flip a coin into the slot to draw an egg from The Egg Machine. Instead of an little pre-Easter delight, the machine deliveries free shopping cart tokens, which are additionally handed out by a Publicis promotion team.


The tokens read „CHECK THE EGG“ followed by the four kinds of husbandry systems used in egg farming and their specifically indicated numbers. Since every egg carton carries a number encoding its respective type of livestock husbandry, the tokens will be an easy-to-use and always-at-hand guideline for customers while doing their grocery shopping:

Eggs marked with 0 (organic) or 1 (free-range) are the best choice, because they come from hens, which are kept absolutely species-appropriate.

 Eggs marked with 2 (deep-litter) and 3 (cage), however, should stay on the shelf. They have been laid by hens, whose living conditions are simply intolerable.

The bottom line is: only buy number 0 and 1 eggs to support humane husbandry and good farmers like Ansgar and reject eggs marked 2 and 3 to put an end to the unnecessary torture of chickens.

Quote from Christina Kunze, Noah e.V.: „In 1999, the German Federal Constitutional Court banned laying batteries in Germany as of 2010 and in Europe as of 2012. Back then, we attended the process with a poster and radio campaign. Unfortunately, the egg barons don’t care for this judgement. They simply move their facilities abroad, preferably to Czech and Poland, where they continue their cruel practice of keeping chickens in cages. Many food manufacturers such as Bahlsen and Kraft also still process eggs from cage system husbandry. In cooperation with the advertising agency Publicis Frankfurt, who provided the idea for this spectacular campaign, we wish to inform consumers so they can help stop this cruelty by rejecting eggs from deep-litter (2) or cage system housing (3).”

Our campaign was met with great interest. Next to innumerable passers-by who took photographs of the egg machine with their mobile phones, many press representatives were present to get their own picture and report about it. A number of photographs and articles have already been published. Our 16 chickens are back home at the Dottenfelder Hof, happy and in best health!