Questions on Selling Eggs... and how to label

[MommaBee]

So we have more eggs than we can eat and have been approached by friends who want to buy our eggs for $5 a dozen... umm ok, sure thing! So we are having fun with it and with more laying hens on the way we MIGHT someday have enough to sell at he local farmers market. I have a few questions about packaging. We bought some fun egg cartons and my husband is a graphic designer so were are working on an easy label to slap on them.

1.) Can I say "Pasture Fed" without having a license? I know when you want to label something "organic" there is a whole mess of red tape to get through.

2.) It seems legal to sell eggs in Texas, but has anyone heard anything differently? From what I understand as long as we do not grade or size them and as long as we put produced by: name and address, then we are ok.

3.) Is there any warnings I should put on the carton? For not we just have friends buying but I would hate to ever get in trouble for not having a warning label later on down the road.

Any other tips and info are greatly appreciated. We aren't quite at the point of concern but I just want to have bases covered ahead of time. Also saves on redesigning the label.

THANKS!

 

[azelgin]

We started out like you have. A few chickens, a few eggs. A few more chickens, even more eggs.
We use the cartons that our customers bring us. We seem to get back more than we send out. Once your customer realize you need them, they collect them for you (at least in our case).
The commercial cartons come with all the warnings and cooking instructions, printed on the inside. We've found the Styrofoam cartons to be the most durable. They can also be cleaned, unlike the cardboard models. I like the clear plastic, as they let the pretty colored eggs show through, but they don't last long and they're no warning labels on the inside.

1) We don't label our eggs as organic. They come from "Cage free, Free range" chickens. All true words. I would rather not bother with the labels, but the wife likes them. We label them a "Fat Mule Farm Product". Everybody knows those crazy people with the mules.

2) We don't sell to people we don't know. Everybody that buys our eggs realizes they come out of a chicken's butt.

This saves explaining the occasional "stuff" stuck to the egg. The really messy ones stay home with us. We haven't ventured into the farmers market scene. We get rid of everything the chickens lay (20 dozen a week), by the wife taking them to work and the neighbors taking them home. If, this was a legal business for us, I'd be able to take a loss on my taxes. Every year. It takes a lot of chickens to break even, when you factor in the cost of the coops, runs, bedding, electricity, fencing, refrigerator, feeders, waterers and so on.

3)Used cartons take care of the warning labels. Even so, should someone want to sue you, they will. Same reason we only sell to regular customers. Pretty hard to argue in court you didn't know what you were eating, when you've been told all about the chickens the eggs are coming from and you've been eating them for months. Also, if someone does get sick, they've eaten the evidence.

If I have to get into being "legal", the chickens will be gone, save for a few to provide us with eggs and entertainment.