Finding Chicken Egg Cartons

Note: This post has been updated and republished. You would think that finding egg cartons for our chicken eggs would be easy. Well, it’s harder than you’d think.

Egg Carton Requirements

We sell our excess chicken eggs, but to comply with Ohio law, the cartons must identify the size and grade of the eggs, the farm name and address where they were produced, and the date the eggs were packed.

The first difficulty is that our girls produce mostly Jumbo eggs, but they’re not all Jumbos and we don’t grade them.

Ohio allows you to sell ungraded eggs of mixed sizes as long as you don’t specify that they’re of a particular grade and specify that they’re mixed sizes.

It’s easy to find egg cartons that say Jumbo, Large, Medium, etc.; but it’s not so easy to find cartons that will hold Jumbo eggs but that don’t specify a size or grade. I finally found some at The Egg Carton Store (www.eggcartonstore.com).

In addition to holding Jumbo eggs, these cartons have empty spaces on the top, ends, and back where the address, sizing, grade, and date information required by Ohio can be added using stamps or labels.

The cartons also say “Local Hens” and direct folks to the Local Hens website (www.localhens.com) where you can upload farm information so customers can find out more about where the eggs are from.

I thought this was a nice touch, and have begun putting our farm information on the site (http://www.localhens.com/farms/profile/bramblestone-farm/). I also found a “packed by” date stamp at The Egg Carton Store so we can stamp the date the eggs were packed on the ends of the cartons.

To meet the requirement for identifying the farm and address on the cartons, I had a custom stamp made at EggCartons.com. They offered a package that included the custom stamp, ink pad, ink, and wooden block for supporting the cartons while stamping them. The cartons are easy to stamp and I thought they came out looking pretty good.

The Egg Carton Store was also able to supply stamps that say “Mixed Sizes” and “Ungraded” that can be stamped on the sides of the cartons – so here’s to Local Hens. Eggs are for sale at Bramblestone Farm!