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Scrambled
labels
25th
January 2005
Despite
a tightening of the labelling rules last year, the labels on egg boxes
can still leave consumers befuddled. We went shopping and found half-a-dozen,
er... eggsamples.
 Woodland
Organic
Nice-looking eggs if you want to pay a premium price. But wait a minute.
How big are they? There is no size mark on this pack, only tiny print
saying that the minimum weight is 328g.
Got a calculator
with you? Then you can work out that the egg size averages a minimum of
54.7g. Got your reference table for egg sizes with you? Then you can see
at a glance that this is at the smaller end of the ‘Medium’
category. Eggs-asperating!
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 Woodland
Free Range
Woodland again, and nothing specifically misleading about the packaging,
except that the brand name Woodland could imply a small independent producer
dedicated to free range and organic eggs reared in pretty forests. In
fact Woodland is a brand of Deans Farms, once owned by the multinational
Dalgety but now a dedicated egg production company. It is the largest
egg producer in Britain, with interests in feed milling, distribution
and ‘hen processing’.
The Woodland
brand is part of a deal between Deans and the Woodland Trust. Deans gets
the eco-friendly brand name and the charity link-up on the pack in return
for 1p given to the Trust for each box sold. Cheep cheep at the price!
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 Old
Cotswold Legbar
Like the Woodland Organic eggs, there is no size marking on this pack.
The tiny print, at the back of the box (so you have already taken it off
the shelf, see) says 300g minimum. That’s 50g per egg minimum, or
Small.
The box also
boasts that the hens are ‘fed on a natural vegetarian cereal diet’.
Well, actually guys, hens are not by nature vegetarian. Originating from
Red Jungle Fowl, they love to munch on grubs, worms and insects to supplement
a diet of seeds, berries and grit. They need animal-based foods to get
the full range of nutrients, so an all-vegetarian cereal diet may not
give them what they need.
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 18
eggs from Iceland
Again the problem of no size indication. We get told that the 18 eggs
will weigh an average of 964g, which means of course that these eggs are
…er…
The answer
is that these eggs are a mix of smallish medium and mediumish small eggs
which the company can’t be bothered to sort.
Oh – but
where on the pack does it say how the eggs were produced? It doesn’t.
But if you look on the eggs themselves it says code 3. Which, as an egg-head
might be able to tell you, means battery cages.
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 10
Very Large Fresh Eggs
The word ‘Fresh’ is a complete red herring as all eggs should
be fresh if they are to be fit for sale. The best before date is just
the same as the other eggs on display.
And notice
that you are not getting 12 eggs but ten, in a box that could easily look
like a regular one-dozen pack.
These were
produced by Bird Bros at the delightfully named Sunny Farm. The box gives
no indication of how the eggs were produced, so it’s a fair bet that
the hens which laid these eggs didn’t see much sunshine down at Sunny
Farm.
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 Columbus
eggs
We will not grouse (oops) about the health claims, although one of these
eggs would provide little more omega-3 than would the vegetable oil you
might fry it in. But we will grouse about the lack of pack labelling telling
us about the size and the production methods.
The size isn’t
given, only (once again) the minimum pack weight (328g this time). So
calculators out and … the eggs are at the small end of Medium.
The production
method? Nothing at all. But take out an egg, read the encoded stamp, and
it turns out that these eggs are from common-but-certainly-not-garden
battery-kept birds.
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 Duck
Eggs
Fancy a change of taste with these duck eggs? The pack tells us they are
free range, which is nice. But the pack says nothing about size nor about
weight.
So we open
up the pack to see what it says stamped on the eggs and the answer is…
nothing at all. No codes, no little lions, nothing. And no provenance
either. On the pack we are only given the helpful information that they
were produced for ...guess who? Yes, Deans, the country’s largest
egg company.
Down-right quackery?
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Shelling
out
By
law, all EU produced eggs should be stamped on their shells with
a code to indicate their provenance. Apart from other codes and
logos, there must be a string of numbers and letters that look something
like this: 3UK123c
The first
number indicates the stocking conditions, based on the code shown
below. In this example these would be eggs from caged hens.
0
= organic
1 = free range
2 = barn eggs
3 = cage eggs
This
initial code is followed by the country, such as UK, and the farm’s
identity number (in this example a fictitious 123c).
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Getting
fresh
Dates on egg boxes should tell you how old the eggs are. The maximum
‘best before’ date is 28 days after laying. Eggs must
be sold (‘delivered to the consumer’) no more than 21
days after laying.
Good
practice – operated by the better supermarkets – cuts
both these dates by a week so that the best before date is 21 days
after laying, and the ‘sell by’ or ‘display until’
date is 14 days after laying.
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 Lion
quality?
The Lion Quality mark can be found on the priciest organic eggs
as well as the cheapest eggs produced by intensively farmed, battery
caged hens.
As such,
the Lion Quality mark gives little indication of welfare issues,
although it does indicate that the laying hens have been vaccinated
against Salmonella Enteritidus and should guarantee that the eggs
are traceable back to the farm at which they were produced.
A best
before date should also be stamped on every egg bearing the Lion
Quality mark, although these dates are not always easy to read.
Eggs
which do not carry the Lion Quality mark may have been imported
from countries which do not meet basic UK and EU health and safety
legislation. Such eggs tend to be used in commercial outlets such
as restaurants and canteens, rather than sold directly to consumers.
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 Class
A, class B and industrial eggs
When buying eggs as a consumer you should only ever come across
Class A eggs, which must be naturally clean, fresh eggs with intact
shells and an air sac not exceeding 6mm in depth. The yolk must
not move away from the centre of the egg on rotation. Such eggs
are usually sorted by machine, and those that fail to make the grade
are designated as Grade B eggs which are ‘broken out’
and pasteurised for use by the food industry.
In addition,
there is another class of eggs called industrial eggs which are
for non-food use only. These are largely used in cosmetic products
such as shampoo and soap.
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Useful
resources
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