From chicken butt to supermarket shelf

🐔🥚 The Industrial Egg Timeline (and Why It’s Riskier)

Imagine this:

You’ve got 5,000 chickens in a massive “cage-free” industrial barn. Sounds cozy, right? Except… it’s not. One hen gets sick. Maybe she’s a Salmonella carrier. She stops laying, starts looking tired — but in a sea of thousands? Nobody notices. No one isolates her. No one even knows.

Now picture the eggs logistic to the grocery store shelf:

In large-scale cage-free systems, egg collection isn’t happening every few hours like on a small farm. It’s more like once per every 2–3 days. That means the eggs are literally sitting in poop, in humid, dusty barns — the perfect place for Salmonella to multiply like it’s on spring break.

🕒 Timeline of an Industrial Farm Cage Free Eggs

1. 🪺 Laid in a poop-dusted barn
   Day 1 — Hen lays egg in communal chaos.
2. 🥚 Sitting uncollected
   Day 2-4 — Eggs stay where they land. No one picks them up yet. Salmonella, if present, enjoys the warmth.
3. 🧼 Finally collected + stored
   Day 4-5 — Eggs get picked up. They don’t go straight to washing. First, they get stored again.
4. 🚿 Washing (cold water usually)
   Day 6-7 — Time to clean up. If it’s not the weekend.
   But here’s the kicker: industrial washing often uses cold water to save money.
   Remember the science? Cold water + warm egg = vacuum effect
   ➡️ Bacteria can be sucked inside the egg through the shell.
   So now, your egg isn’t just dirty on the outside… it’s potentially contaminated inside.
5. 📦 Sorting + packing
   Day 8-10— Eggs are sorted, labeled, boxed. Maybe wait in a warehouse.
6. 🚚 Shipped
   Day 11-15 — Loaded onto trucks. Another couple of days in transit.
7. 🏪 Stored at supermarket
   Day 15-17 — Eggs wait in the back. Cool storage, yes — but clock’s ticking.
8. 🛒 Shelf time
   Day 18-21 — Finally in the fridge case where you buy them. Three weeks have passed since the chicken laid them.

🧫 Add all that up:

It can take 2-3 weeks for a store-bought egg to go from hen to shelf.

And the egg has:

• No bloom (natural biosecurity film that protect egg from any Bacteria or viruses, it will be washed off for industrial eggs)
• Higher risk of internal contamination
• No one monitoring the hens individually
• Sat around in poop for days
• Room temperature or hot outside storage condition for at least 2 weeks

🏡 Now Let’s Talk About Small Homestead Eggs

• 🐔 I have under 40 chickens. I know all of them by name.
• 🧐 If one hen gets tired, looks sick, or stops laying — I notice it that same day. Same hour actually, I have CCTV cameras everywhere and obsessed with watching them haha
• 🧺 We collect eggs 3 times a day.
  No “eh, I’ll get it tomorrow.” It’s more like remote work therapeutical exercise.
• ❄️ My eggs go straight to the fridge after collection with proper sorting out and date labeling.
• 🛍️ We sell or use them by Day 3 at the latest.
• 💦 Most eggs don’t even need washing. If they do, it’s done carefully in warm water, dried, and chilled. We sort out eggs in the way that pooped and washed we consume by ourself to do not contaminate the eggs cartoons.

So the eggs you get from me?

• Laid yesterday.
• Refrigerated today.
• On your plate by tomorrow.

That’s what I call FRESH.

Interesting fact:

The multiple tests on the chicken health for small homesteads and big farms, showed 0.001% of salmonella carriers in small homestead. Even with all those chances.

🧠 Bottom Line: Why Store Eggs Are Riskier for Salmonella

🥗 And Bonus Fact:

Anyway… You’re 100x more likely to get Salmonella from store-bought salad greens than from even industrial eggs.

Yup. Lettuce, herbs, and spinach are sneaky!

So if you’re scared of Salmonella, don’t point fingers at chickens or eggs or even meat. All of those usually being refrigerated more carefully than lettuce

Look at the soggy plastic box of mixed greens you forgot in the back of your fridge. 🥬😬