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Five times a year, Virginia Jacobsen and her husband Jens-Hugo make a midnight run to the airport. Under cover of darkness, they load their truck with their precious cargo and "race like hell" back home to Chilliwack, B.C.

By then, it has been a long journey for the 4,000 Redbro chicks, flown over from Lyons, France, to be reared on British Columbia soil, and the Jacobsens want to get them out of crates as fast as possible. The chicks will spend the next nine to 10 weeks gently plumping up in a 12,000-square-foot barn, eating organic grain, sunflower seeds and the odd earthworm. It's not a bad life for a bird: These chickens get to stretch their legs almost twice as long as industrially produced poultry (a grain-fed diet does not pack on the pounds as fast as one that includes animal protein), are antibiotic- and medication-free, and are lovingly fed by hand twice a day.

They are about as fancy a fowl as you'll find on a Canadian dinner plate. Indeed, in Vancouver, a Polderside Farms' Redbro is as close to celebrity as a chicken gets. When he heard about them, Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud not only sourced the birds for Lumière and DB Bistro Moderne, he dispatched a photographer to Chilliwack and later sent Ms. Jacobsen a large framed print. (At the bistro, the birds are literally on the menu - the photo is part of a collage that graces its cover.)

On menus and at specialty butchers throughout Vancouver, Redbros are so popular they're sometimes listed simply as "Virginia's chicken." Poultry has never been so posh.

"The flavour is unlike any other conventional or free range chicken I've had before," says Jeff Van Geest, former owner of Vancouver's Aurora Bistro and now restaurant chef at the Metropolitan Hotel. "There's a real umami - a perfect savoury balance of flavour that responds well to all types of cooking methods."

The personalities behind Polderside are important, he says: "Virginia and Jens put a lot of love into these chickens, and it makes a real difference in the finished bird."

Though fancy breeds are generating lots of interest in the United States, pickings are slim in Canada. A Quebec farm, Ferme des Voltigeurs, has turned 40 per cent of its flock over to grain-fed, medication-free birds and, though the chicken is a standard breed, the taste is improved by the slower growing cycle and gentle rearing. It currently graces the menu at Toronto's Far Niente, the chicken of choice of chef Gord Mackie.Ironically, it was a Canadian - B.C. poultry breeder Peter Thiessen - who created the Blue Foot chicken (with Bob Shipley, a Californian farm manager) that was all the rage on New York menus from Per Se to Alain Ducasse a few years ago.

It is a hugely expensive business, but Ms. Jacobsen says it is worth it. "We know we can trust the genetic makeup of the birds we import," she says, noting that she hopes eventually to bring a breeder flock from France to the farm and produce the chicks themselves. Right now, they raise 20,000 chickens annually, along with 20,000 ducks.

And though they have only been in business for two years, the Jacobsens' commitment to ethically reared, quality meat is paying off. Rob Feenie wants to secure Redbros for feature dishes on Cactus Club menus (the Joeys chain has also expressed interest), and Whole Foods wants them on its store shelves. Ms. Jacobsen is also looking for a cheese maker she can source whey powder from, to start creating the distinctive white flesh much admired in Europe.

Demand is such that Ms. Jacobsen has decided to expand. With permission granted to build another barn, she says she will be adding guinea fowl and geese to the flock this year. "I want to raise the geese to produce a natural foie gras, without the use of gavage," she says, referring to force-feeding.

Her only real hurdle is processing the poultry, which must be done at plants offsite. "The ... system is set up for the mainstream industrial chicken producers," she explains. "But our birds cannot be processed the same way, so nobody is interested in taking our orders."

Ms. Jacobsen has asked the poultry marketing board to allow Polderside to build its own processing plant.

"The system right now means that everything has to be the same - and so the product becomes dumbed down," she says. "We need more diversity, and consumers deserve to be able to source poultry they can have confidence in."