Does Aldi also carry chocolate-covered Egyptian cotton?
Eggs here in Ontario are currently at about $2 US per dozen, down from about $2.75 a year ago.
I’d rather have a parachute.
My mom’s a small-time chicken farmer (she only has a half-dozen hens, and sells only to a few neighbors), and she still manages to make a profit on them. Of course, she doesn’t have any middlemen and she’s able to charge more than the grocery stores, but IIRC, her costs are still only around 5 cents an egg.
In addition to the commercial chicken feed, she also gives them some of the weeds from her garden and assorted vegetable scraps, and all the bugs the can scratch up, which stretches the feed a bit (and also improves the quality of the eggs).
The desire for a parachute proves you are sane…which means you can’t have a parachute.
Most definitable debatable. What’s more, unprovable.
Maybe, but the total value of that chicken over its lifetime is probably higher, when you factor in the eggs it laid AND the carcass value once it’s done laying.
And… if you’re in the business of making chicken stock, you WANT those old worn out birds. They make more flavorful stock than the young, meaty ones. We get them from a local farmer who sells eggs, and occasionally his scrawny, tough egg-layers when they’re done for, and they make stellar chicken stock and soup. Far better than a cheap fryer from the grocery store.
UK battery hens are treated slightly less brutally than US hens. It’s a side effect of the veal controversy in the early 90s (and the general increase in factory farming awareness during the BSE scare).
Yes, and everyone has a share!
Average price for a dozen eggs is 2.97. That is just about 25 cents per egg. Chicken feed can be had on the internet for 15 for a 50 pound bag. An egg laying chicken can eat 6 pounds of feed per month. That is 6 cents a day. Feed is only 25% of the cost of the average egg.
Aldi is probably using eggs as a loss leader because they are charging 1 sixth of the average cost for eggs.
Low or high, it must be factored into the total cost and profit figures.
While Aldi is probably treating this as a loss leader your prices are too high:
My family ran a chicken farm. 10,000 hens and 3,000 roosters. We produced hatching eggs for a major poultry company. We got paid by the dozen. There was also a hatching bonus at the end of the season. I think a 80% hatching average was required to get a bonus. It might have been a little higher or lower. This was quite a few years ago.
Hens lay every other day. we averaged about 4,800 a day. We counted them by adding up the number of filled cases at the end of the day.
The bad news? Hens start to molt and stop laying within a year. We got a fresh batch of six week old chickens every 10 to 11 months. The poultry company picked up the old chickens. We usually had a couple weeks to prepare the empty houses. Wash *everything *thoroughly with water hoses. Remove the old chicken litter. Bring in fresh sawdust and spread it out. Raking out the sawdust in all the chicken houses took 3 of us four days. The only break we got was after the six week old chickens arrived. We had a couple easy weeks before egg production started. Feed them early and the rest of the day was for relaxing.
Consumer eggs are similar except their hens are in cages. No roosters needed. The eggs roll into a trough. They may have 25,000 hens in a typical operation. Several of my friends in school lived on chicken farms. I earned extra money working in chicken houses.
Worst job ever! I had the misfortune of having the job of helping remove the hens from their cages after their laying days were over. An assembly line of people handing the hens down the line, through the slatted floor and to the rolling cages which are moved onto the semi. Nothing like having thousands of excited hens right above shitting unbelievable amounts upon you. Literally raining shit.
Hens will continue laying for a lot longer than a year, and more often than once every two days, if you manage their lighting levels.
This discussion absolutely destroys the winter time advice, “Dress in layers.” That would be one noisy, smelly parka!
Chicken farmers producing those eggs aren’t buying feed online for 15$ per 50 pound bags.
Anecdotally and based purely off memories from when my dad was a pullet farmer… The split between farmer, processors and stores isn’t 50% 25% 25% as assumed in the OP, but closer to 20-25% 40% 35-40%. That’s in Canada under supply management, down south in the States, the farmers get fucked over way, way harder than that.
I recently bought 2 dozen of Aldi’s large eggs on super-sale. I forget the exact price, but well less than $1/dozen. I always buy size “large” and get them from one of 4 local grocery brands depending mostly on which one I happen to stop in first. So I often, but not exclusively, get Aldi’s eggs. The various brands always appear pretty interchangeable and consistent in size.
But …
The eggs in these two recent Aldi’s cartons were uniformly sized, but significantly smaller than any “large” eggs I’ve ever seen from Aldi’s or any other supplier.
USDA says eggs are sized by the weight of a dozen: FAQ link (Expand the “Sizing of Eggs” entry).
I should have weighed them; I’m convinced there’s no way they could have met the standard. I agree it’s insanely unlikely Aldi’s would deliberately sell underweight products; the reputational risk would be yuuuge. But there’s no getting away from the fact these eggs were visually much smaller than Aldi’s “large” on previous occasions. Or the other stores’ “large”. And this was true in the shell, in the pan, and on the plate.
I was going to point out that Aldi’s eggs may be very cheap but they’re the low point for eggs. Even the plain white eggs will sell for more in other grocery stores and, these days, there’s about ten different choices on the shelf if not more. A super-cheap store brand white, a slightly more expensive “farm” white (both whites also in varying size grades increasing in price), different brown eggs, organic eggs, free-range eggs, etc. Prices can range from 69¢ a dozen to $5.79 a dozen. So you can’t figure all of the egg production happening at a penny or two per egg.
Wow, do we ever get screwed on grocery prices in Canada. The standard price at my local grocery store for a dozen of large eggs is $2.89. Occasionally the omega-6 eggs (or whatever) will go on sale for about $3 a dozen.