I’m in the grocery store today, watching the stocker replenish the egg case for what was surely the umpteenth time. Made me wonder how egg suppliers met the demand for Easter egg consumption. I mean, I know they can’t exactly squeeze the hens to make them double their output for that month or so before Easter. So what DO they do?
A few creative theories:
Same amount of eggs are produced as always, but they merely shift supply to retail while other egg consumers (I dunno, the people who make frozen breakfasts; vaccine producers, what have you) use less during that period.
OR
They plan for this by a planned increase in the egg-laying hen population. They time it so these hens mature to their egg-laying max right around Easter. After Easter, said hens become dog food.
Eggs will keep in cold storage a long time. Eggs that have been in storage for longer than 30 days are called “storage eggs” and must be labeled as such. There’s nothing wrong with them–the government just thinks consumers have a right to know when they’re not getting “farm fresh eggs”.
So if the eggs you bought were already a month old, that means that they can be a couple of months old by the time you use them to make Easter eggs. But, again, there’s nothing dangerous or unhealthy about 2-month old eggs, they just lose some quality as they age. My WAG is that the egg producers don’t change anything on the production end. The egg wholesalers probably just earmark a bigger percentage of current fresh-egg production for the Kroger dairy case, and bring more old eggs out of cold storage to send to their customers like restaurants and dried-egg processors. McDonalds doesn’t care whether your Egg McMuffin is made with “farm fresh eggs”.