Egg Labeling

Have you wondered about the freshness of your eggs and how long they will last?  I get these questions often and I’ll tell you what we are required to do for labeling from our state agricultural department and the USDA. 

First, we will start with the mandated regulations we are required to do.  This is for anyone/corporation selling shell eggs in the state of MN.  The USDA also has regulations (we would need to follow if selling across state lines), and each state determines which ones they want to enforce in their state.  MN is one of the stricter states and requires most if not all of USDA’s regulations. 

So, we are required to refrigerate our eggs and collect daily.  We can hold eggs in our cooler up to 30 days unwashed.  At that point we must package them for sale, and we wash them due to hens being on pasture.  When we package the eggs for sale, we must put a sell by, expired or good by date AND the Julian date we are packaging them on the carton.  Julian date is a continuous count of days and fractions since noon Universal Time on January 1 of the year.  Jan 1 = 1, March 1 = 60 (except on a leap year), Dec 31 = 365.  I choose using Sell By date, because it’s not so scary to the consumer who is trained to throw away expired food.  This is on the white label on the end of our cartons.  The Sell By date is 30 days from the day we package the eggs, and the Julian day. 

So I can, or some big food corporation, can hold eggs for up to 60 days before they need to sell them.  The USDA is telling you that eggs are good for 2 months or more there.  I have read that eggs are good anywhere from 4-6 months. 

Several years back, Quality Egg out of Iowa was caught mislabeling older eggs so they could still sell them over the 60-day mark, and they also had a salmonella outbreak in their eggs.  This was when the nation had a backlog of eggs in inventory.  Now the extermination of laying hens due to Avian Flu outbreaks have made the nations eggs inventory low and higher priced. 

In our added transparency here at our farm, we also put another label on our cartons.  That is the day the egg was laid, the green label on the end of our cartons.  Then there is no guessing, and being confused by the Julian date. 

With this added transparency, I also get the question of why can’t we sell eggs that are “fresher”?  Because then I would have a lot of “old” eggs nobody wants.  We have 500 laying hens, and managing our egg inventory is an art to try and have a non-stop egg supply year-round for our customers. 

Egg production goes up and down, high from February through June, low from October through November typically for us.  I have more customers buying in the warmer months of the year, and less buying in the winter from January through April.  In order to have eggs anytime you want them, I have to have surplus’s certain times of the year.  The surplus we have in the first half of the year, will help us as we get short on eggs come November when we are switching over to a new laying hen flock. 

For some perspective, our family only eats the non-saleable eggs.  The cracked eggs, the eggs with stains on the shell and they look dirty, the deformed looking eggs.  I find them as I wash them and candle them, as I prepare eggs for selling each week based on orders.  We are eating the same date, if not older, eggs than you are.  We haven’t died yet.  I don’t see much difference in the quality of the egg I’m eating each morning for breakfast from any fresher egg. 

If you want fresher eggs, you should find a farmer with a smaller flock or raise your own.  I don’t mean to be nasty about it, just direct.  I could have fresher eggs, and then be without eggs to sell 3 months out of the year.  It would be a nice break for me, but usually the customer is not happy then. 

Then beyond the required name, address, zip code, perishable keep refrigerated and safe handling instructions, I can put whatever else on the carton I want.  Organic is the only word I can’t use without being certified organic.  And this goes for any other farmer or company. 

This is where greenwashing comes into play.  Many big food companies benefit from the image us small farmers are out there generating.  You will see pretty pasture like pictures of hens on cartons, anyone can say their eggs are pasture raised.  How many consumers check the companies eggs they buy at the super market?  One said company that has pasture raised eggs almost anywhere you can buy eggs, hasn’t even had their hens out on pasture with the Avian Flu pandemic decimating industrial flocks.  Quote from their blog post “A number of our farms are housing their birds in the barns, in line with the guidance that we get from state regulators.“   If you are buying their organic eggs, you are paying more than buying our truly pasture raised eggs, fed no-soy transitional organic feed.  It’s basically our MN winter eggs. 

One way to check on farms, or company’s eggs that you can actually get the address of the farm and not just the packer, is to look on the satellite view of Google Maps.  Here’s ours just updated this past May 2024.  And I’ve saved every Google Map picture they have taken of our farm since we have been farming here.  Those white roofed buildings move. 

This picture is from 2017

Greenwashing labels requires a whole other post of it’s own.  Best is to know your farmer so you can actually ask them the questions you have.  And then they’ll write a blog post!