An egg farmer has been sentenced to home detention for selling $1 million worth of cage eggs that he pretended were free range.
Between April 2010 and November 2011 John Garnett's Forest Hill Farm packaged cage eggs in cartons labelled "free range" or "barn-laid" and sold them to shops and supermarkets in Auckland and Northland.
Garnett is estimated to have made an additional $376,000 from the sale of the falsely labelled eggs.
In the Whangarei District Court on Tuesday, he was sentenced to 12 months' home detention and 200 hours of community service.
Judge Duncan Harvey said he considered it to be very serious offending, resulting in the public being severely let down.
