A new way to buy eggs

Logan Sachon | 08:00 PM, Thursday, June 30, 2011

Groceries

Photo by pietroizoo

I used to work in a grocery store, the kind of store that locally sourced as much as they could. I once asked the PG (perishable grocery) guys which brand of eggs were the the most humane eggs in the store and they looked at me and said, "none of them." Basically, even if eggs are organic and free range and have pictures of happy chickens in the grass on the cartons, the chickens are not leading happy lives. It's a numbers game. Large companies and large farms are needed to produce the amount of egges required for even a small chain of ten stores. Backyard chickens these are not.

Is $8 a dozen too much?

This answer bummed me out. I vowed to start only buying eggs from the farm market, which worked sometimes, but didn't work other times (the farm market is not open when you want to bake a cake at midnight on a Tuesday and need eggs). But I haven't forgotten what the PG guys told me, and it bums me out that I can't readily get eggs I can feel okay about buying.

A new site is hoping to change that. Treehugger reports that Eggzy.com will bring folks with chickens and eggs together with folks who want to buy those eggs. The site makes it really easy for egg producers to keep track of their flocks' output and determine pricing structures. Right now the site has 400 active users.

Would you use a site like Eggzy to buy eggs from your neighbors?

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