A Matter of Brown or White

Is there a difference between brown eggs and white eggs?

Yes. One is brown, the other is white and you’ll pay more for the brown at the checkout.

Beyond the shell color, what slips out when you crack either into a hot frying pan is a different story. Trace the eggs back to the breed, how the chickens are fed, where they are raised, and who has a hand in doing so, and you’ll have all the proof you need that at least when it comes to nutritious, great tasting eggs, the chicken does indeed come first.

To understand eggs, from the outside in, let’s turn to a two “crack” experts. Joan Richmond from Meadow Rise Farm, Bellville, OH farms a handful of acres, mostly dedicated to produce, and tends a flock of productive layers. Kathy Breychak, the Blue Egg Farmer from Columbia Station, OH operates a CSA. You can tell by the name of her farm that eggs are her signature product, treasured by her CSA members and a few restaurants throughout Northeast Ohio.

They’ve answered the questions most people have on their mind when it comes to brown eggs versus white eggs.

It’s Brown or White…or Sometimes Blue!

“The basic facts about brown eggs versus white eggs is simple,” said Joan. “Brown eggs come from brown chickens and white eggs come from white chickens.”

That’s the general rule but not without an occasional twist. Some of the breeds that lay brown eggs are the Plymouth Rock and the Red Rock Cross. Both have brown feathers. White Leghorns, a superior, productive layer, produces white eggs. This is the breed likely responsible for the stacks of egg cartons found in your local grocery store.

There are few breeds out there that skew the norm. Delawares, temperamental producers, are beautiful white birds that lay rich brown eggs. Same goes for the White Wyandotte. Sussex, a rust red hen, will lay creamy white eggs, sometimes buff colored. Then there are the bluish green eggs from the Araucana.

What makes one shell brown, another white and yet another blue has everything to do with the breed, and nothing to do with how or what they are fed.

“The chickens’ physiology is responsible for the color of the shells,” Kathy explains. “As the shell forms in some breeds, it becomes pigmented from hemoglobin to produce brown tones, and in others, by cyanins from bile to produce green to blue shades—or if there is no pigment released, the shells are white.”

Beauty Is Only Shell Deep

There is still a perception that brown eggs are more nutritious, healthful or in some way more special than white eggs as the higher price in the grocery store hints. Both Joan and Kathy concur that while the beautifully colored shells get your attention and a little more of your food dollar, the real beauty is what’s inside the shell.

Joan speculates that for many years people became used to eating eggs from chickens raised in CAFO's (confined or concentrated animal feeding operation) where the bird’s living conditions were poor and the feed less than nutritious. Their eggs featured flabby yolks, watery whites, and unremarkable tastes.

“For the longest time this is what eggs were,” said Kathy. “Everyone who bought eggs knew nothing else until recently—perhaps starting in the 70's and 80's.”

“Perhaps someone found a local farmer raising brown chickens in their barnyards where they ate clover, dandelions, weeds, and bugs,” said Joan. “The brown eggs looked and tasted so much better because the hens led a healthier life and ate healthier foods,” evident in the beautiful, intensely colored yolks that stand tall and the nice, thick whites—just like the eggs from the birds that both Joan and Kathy tend.

Kathy agrees with Joan’s version. “Brown hens were dual purpose hens,” she said, “so they would lay eggs and were good meat chickens.”

She adds that large-scale egg producers noticed that people were into brown eggs and willing to pay more. (Ka-ching!) They had a few obstacles to overcome.

First, the hens laying these great eggs were broody meaning they will sit on her nest or her sisters’ in the hopes of hatching a brood rather than producing more eggs. Secondly, brown hens were larger than the prolific White Leghorns, so they required more food, bigger cages and hence, more money to raise and keep.

Instead of just quietly letting the brown eggs remain a niche market, production farmers began to cross different breeds of brown layers with those hens that were smaller, more efficient, and produced consistently. That’s the unofficial short story on why you can always find brown eggs in the grocery store—because there are lots of chickens bred to lay them. And they cost more because someone is willing to pay the price.

A Good Egg

Go to the grocery store and buy two cartons of eggs, one brown and the other white. Fried, poached or incorporated into baking, you will likely not notice any difference in size, appearance, taste or performance between the two. Not a rule, just an observation. It’s not that they’re bad eggs, they’re just not great eggs.

Kathy reminds that in the past 10 years or so, more regulations have be imposed on large scale production operations that require producers to better house and feed their flocks of thousands, a step in the right direction for more quality in the eggs you find without fail in the grocery. Yet changing the long running operations to comply with the new regulations costs the producers more who in turn pass it down to the customers.

So where do you find the really great eggs with the bright orange yolk, thick and rich with a taste unlike eggs you’ve had before? Look for places like Joan’s Meadow Rise Farm. Her girls range on pasture, lawn, and garden during the day where they feast on what she calls their “salad bar”—in the spring it’s natural fescue and white clover, dandelions and bugs plus organic grain from a nearby farmer mixed with freshly ground soybean, oats, corn, flax, oyster shell, and kelp. In the winter, a diet of whole grains works to keep them warmer and productive.

Kathy’s bevy of beauties roam her Columbia Station farm freely to hunt for protein-rich bugs and worms, graze on grasses, clover, and timothy, eat wholesome grain, corn, oats, and calcium-rich, ground oyster shells, preen in the warm sun, and take as many dust baths as they please.

If finding all twelve eggs intact when you open the carton from the grocery store is as excited as you’ve ever been about eggs, seek out farm fresh eggs and your expectations will forever. You’ll know the minute you taste one that it is indeed the healthy chicken that comes before the tasty egg.