Which came first? EGG-centric enterprise leads to Scramblins.

• Position: Attitude at Altitude

NEW YELLOW-AND-GREEN BOXES filled with hard-as-rock frozen egg mixtures made their way onto many Colorado and Western-region grocery shelves in time for holiday breakfasts last year, as the woman behind the new product marked the 12th year of growth for her company.

"I wanted to diversify from the shelled-egg business," said Cyd Szymanski, 100 percent owner and chief executive of Colorado Natural Eggs, a 16-employee firm that has sold eggs from cage-free chickens for those 12 years.

Szymanski has been written about by media ranging from local newspapers to the New York Times over the years, mostly about her efforts to establish her Nest Fresh brand of eggs as the premier cage-free produced egg in the industry. That she has had to battle members of her own family as competitors in the egg business has provided a nice hook to the story.

But her newest product, Szymanski said, is partly the inspiration of one of her family members, brother Terry Osborne, production manager for Colorado Natural Eggs. He and company president George Blauvelt proposed Nest Fresh Scramblins, frozen egg mixtures in five flavors from "Veggie Express" to "Bacon 'n' Cheese", in order to solve a problem shared by all natural-egg producers. Young and old chickens too often produce an egg that is either too big or too small for packaging according to the standards of the brand.

"Well, let's make another product," Szymanski recalls her brother and Blauvelt suggesting. It took about a year and $200,000 worth of research and...