I am wondering if anyone has regulations in their state such as being required to candle the eggs, using new egg crates, or anything else that would maybe add to the expense or cost?
Or are these things necessary when you are selling to people you know: friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc...
I have found some regulations in our state but I don't know anyone who follows those rules. Haven't sold any eggs yet, because I need to work all this out. Would love to defray some of the feed costs. My but those chickens eat a lot, waste a lot, too.
Depends on the state. Search your state's Revised Code and Administrative Code. Your state Farm Bureau might help you find laws, too. Finally, the municipality and the county where you want to sell eggs might have health department laws regarding retail egg sales. We have to mark out any markings on the cartons if we were to re-use cartons and we have to add labels with specific information on them. Because that looks terrible, we do use new cartons.
We do follow all applicable laws. Here is Ohio, that precludes us from selling eggs retail at farmer's markets. We'd need to keep the eggs below 40 degrees F, and some health departments near us want that to be in a mobile refrigerator which costs $$$, so there's no point selling them since our profit per carton is low. Some municipalities would want us to have a license, which would also kill our profits. Instead, we wholesale to a small grocery co-op. We still have lots of handling and labeling laws to follow.
With cartons costing us 30-40 cents each, our egg costs for a finished, washed dozen ends up to be around $2.73/dozen if you amortize over the whole year and remember to include the feed the hen eats while she's a pullet and moulting and not laying. We sell cartons wholesale for $3/dozen, and the store marks them up from there. We're sure not getting rich, but it means I keep my hens for free. We sell to a woman who then passes the eggs along to her customers at $4/dozen. We do sell to some friends for $3.50 dozen here and there, which I suppose is not strictly by the books since we deliver the eggs to them. We also have drive-up customers and sell to them for $3.50 which is legal since they buy them on the premises where they are produced.
I'd love to sell some of our meat birds, but Ohio law stops me from doing that unless the customer comes here, picks out a chicken, and takes it home alive OR we do the processing on site and the customer comes here to pick them up. But since we figured out we were making $1/chicken and that $1 sure as heck didn't compensate us for having to process the chicken, we only do meat birds for ourselves and pay someone else to process them. But since they are processed off the property, I can't sell them under Ohio law. Blah.
