From Nest to Market: How We Collect, Package and Sell Eggs

So we had a viewer recently ask us how we go about collecting, packaging, labeling, and distributing our eggs and so we're going to walk you through that process today. So off the get-go we have around 200 hens and we average in the warm months around 150 eggs every single day. That means especially in the spring when it's still a little wet out we have to collect eggs multiple times a day. Now we keep our bedding very clean and that's essential for getting clean eggs. You want the cleanest eggs you can possibly get. The less you have to wash the better. So make sure every day when you collect your eggs that you're putting fresh nesting material in these nesting boxes. Now it never fails we always always have eggs that need to be either brushed off or sometimes washed off but we do have customers that prefer unwashed and unrefrigerated eggs. So what we do with those is we take those ones out of the when we collect we take those out of the bucket first and we package them up first and that is the cleanest eggs and then we take all of our dirty ones and we we separate those and now whether that means they just have to have a wire brush and we brush them off or we take a damp rag we wash them off. But if we are using a damp rag we take those eggs and we put them directly in the refrigerator and most of our retail outlets that we sell to well not most all of our retail outlets we sell to they have refrigeration. So those eggs no matter if they're washed or unwashed when they get there they're going in the refrigerator. So this is our process after we collect eggs we bring them in we take all the clean ones out because we do have some dirty ones like I was saying and we'll clean those ones up but we'll put all the clean ones inside the carton first package those up and those are the first ones that go to our normal customers that meet us every week so outside of the grocery stores. Now the grocery stores we went to and we've gone to are our local health food store which they sell a lot of organic stuff you know that's what they're after they're interested in a local so that's what we'll do and then if we have extra eggs we have gone to a bakery a local bakery because they love local stuff as well and then we did go to a little bit larger grocery store that was in town too but we've since not been selling to them anymore just because we don't have enough eggs so we take the eggs we have current our current system is local customers we meet them on Tuesdays once a week at 3 p.m. at a local meeting spot in town and then we sell to a local fruit stand and then we have our normal health food store. So you're just going to want to go in and talk to these folks and see if they're interested in eggs but yeah so that's that. So if you have a business card this is where you'd want to take a business card and put in here and that's how you really start getting your name out there close them up like this where we're at we're required to put a seal sticker on them so we do that and then we put our own sticker on them as well. That's that and now that one is ready to sell so these ones won't go in the refrigerator because they haven't been washed so we'll set them out in our mudroom and we deliver in two days from now so perfectly fresh perfectly good any of the ones we wash like I was saying go straight in the refrigerator. So what we use to brush the eggs off and if you have eggs that look like this we just take a brush and we just brush anything off them these ones ones like this just don't need to be washed and then you take those put them in the carton and you're good to go. I'll give an example of something that can't be brushed off though something like that can't be brushed off and we wouldn't even wash something like that that's going to go straight in our own egg basket and we'll use that for ourselves. We don't mind using the dirty eggs. We don't mind at all but obviously you're not going to want to sell that so like this one this one will wash off with a rag that's perfectly able to do that and then that one can go right in the fridge. Now you don't want to use any like soapy water you don't want to use any bleach water you just want to use regular old water with a clean rag wash them off change out your rag often if you got a whole bunch of them and that's just what we do. Like this one is perfectly brushable you just have a little bit of dirt on it you just literally take it and you you can brush it off and there's nothing wrong with that egg at all that saves you from having to wash it and it's good to go. So the reason you you wouldn't try your hardest not to wash these eggs and especially if you wash them that you want to put them directly in the refrigerators because when the chicken lays the egg they have a bloom over the outside of the egg because the egg is very porous so with that with that bloom over the outside it protects it from any kind of bacteria getting in it and once you wash it you're washing that off and like I said with a porous egg it's going to pick up anything. So there we go that's how we do it and we'll end up somewhere this week with around 50 dozen eggs we'll probably have 10 or 15 left over in our fridge for customers that show up on farm and we'll repeat it again next week.