It may not seem like a particularly important topic at first, but if you plan to sell some of your eggs, you must prepare them for sale properly. Otherwise, you’ll quickly lose your customer base. No one will say anything to you about the reasons for not buying your eggs—they simply won’t buy them. After a while, you’ll be left with a lot of eggs on your hands and no buyers.
When you get the eggs from the coop, make sure you wash them. This might seem like an obvious thing to do, but some people have actually tried to sell unwashed eggs, which is hazardous to a customer’s health, as well as unappealing. I normally use Dawn Antibacterial soap to wash the eggs and then rinse them thoroughly. The soap ensures that the outside of the egg is free of pathogens. Of course, you need to perform this process carefully or else you’ll end up with a lot of unsellable eggs.
After you allow the eggs to air dry (or dry them carefully with a towel), you need to inspect them carefully. Any flawed eggs go into my personal pack. Eggs with cracks are cooked thoroughly and fed either to the dogs or cats. There isn’t a good reason to waste good protein, but if the egg has any cracks at all, you can’t vouch for the integrity of the content. A mix of egg, rice, and leftover meat makes for a dandy addition to your pet’s daily food. Sometimes I throw in a few leftover vegetables as well.
We don’t have any roosters. If we did, we’d also need to candle the eggs to ensure there were no embryos inside. Because we buy our chicks from other places, we won’t ever have roosters for our laying hens. You need to decide on whether to keep roosters based on your particular egg laying needs. However, it’s still possible that our eggs could have a blood spot in them. We simply offer our customers a replacement egg should this happen. So far, it never has, but it could happen given that our chickens are free range. Theoretically, you can candle the eggs to find this sort of problem, but it’s still possible to miss it, so having a replacement policy is the best way to go.
At this point, you have a number of washed eggs that lack flaws. It’s time to weigh them using an egg scale. I generally keep small eggs for my personal use. Medium-sized eggs are sold at a discount, traded for something I need, or given to friends and neighbors. The large and jumbo eggs are placed into cartons and sold at full price.
Create an attractive display for your eggs. For example, I’ve set up kid friendly egg cartons. The cartons will contain an attractive mix of blue, green, brown, tan, and speckled eggs (the range of colors the hens lay). Placing the eggs in some sort of pattern also helps. Even though the inside of the egg is the same in all cases, the eye catching patterns really help to sell your eggs to the public. Of course, adults may prefer a less colorful display, which means grading the eggs by color and placing like colors in a carton. The point is to make your eggs look especially nice.
Preparing your eggs properly will help keep you in sales. In fact, a combination of high quality and classy presentation will usually net you more customers than you can accommodate as long as your prices are also in line with what the market will allow. Let me know your thoughts on egg preparation at [email protected].
