Egg Candling Class: We can legally sell eggs!

In the state of Georgia it is illegal to sell eggs without first taking the Egg Candling Class. This class is offered free of charge to state residents by the Georgia Department of Agriculture. They hold the class a couple times a month all over the state. For the last 5 months I’ve been keeping an eye on the calendar waiting for a class to be held close to us. We finally got the opportunity to attend at the end of October, just a few weeks before the rest of our ducks will start laying!

You’re probably wondering why you would need an egg candling class to sell eggs. While most people think of checking for egg fertility as candling that isn’t entirely true. It also refers to the egg grading process which uses a light to determine the quality of an egg (the grade). You can find this grading on all commercially sold eggs in the U.S. Usually AA but sometimes A as well as the size grade like extra large. AA is the highest quality, then A and B. B is not sold commercially. It is required that we provide the grade of our eggs on the carton when being sold, hence the need for an egg candling class.

(Just one of the factors you look at when grading eggs) source

Half of the class focuses on the legal requirements of selling eggs. The cartons must be labeled in a specific manner and can only be sold from us directly to the person who will be eating them. We are not allowed to have a grocery store sell our eggs we would need to go through a more rigorous certification program, unless we owned the store. They must be clean and refrigerated. This requirement is deceptively simple but actually requires you to have a mini fridge in your car if you are transporting the eggs to the customer, likewise if you are selling at a farmers market. If not they must pick the eggs up from your residence.

The other half of the class goes over what elements to look at to determine quality and then we got hands on experience grading 100, yes 100!! eggs. We also watched a video that explains how an egg is formed which I found particularly interesting and explains how a bloodspot happens. You would be surprised how many people with poultry have that one wrong let me tell you! Here’s the video:

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Side note: you cannot properly candle eggs for this purpose with those flashlight candlers. This one is what you would need.

I will mention that if you are interested in the natural, ‘ancient’ ways of producing food this class will rankle. It is specifically advised that you should not leave eggs on the counter even if you have left the bloom on. While I understand that we have to clean them and refrigerate the selling eggs for legal purposes our instructor made it a point to tell us that it is dangerous not to. She even mentioned that 1 day on the counter is 7 days in fridge, meaning the degradation of the quality would be 7 days’ worth if left out. If any of you seen research backing this up, I would be interested in reading it! Having never seen any proof of this I believe its utter nonsense. I would argue that removing the bloom actually makes it more likely that bacteria will enter the egg making it dangerous to eat. They don’t refrigerate eggs in Europe and they are all perfectly fine. Once you get past the regulatory insanity that exists it was relatively interesting.