It’s spring and everyone is looking for hatching eggs. Your hens are laying some incredible colors and you’re ready to start offering their pretty eggs for sale. So how do you start? Where do you advertise? How do you find buyers? We’ll walk you through every step of photographing, packaging and selling your hatching eggs for successful springtime profit!
Photographing, Packaging and Selling Hatching Eggs
Buyers want good quality hatching eggs. The first step is to ensure you are offering purebreds or interesting colored layers. Make sure you understand basic egg color inheritance genetics to ensure you are using a rooster who will produce offspring that lay the colored eggs you intend. You can even supplement with Poultry NutriDrench to increase shell quality and speckling in speckled olive eggers, as described here. After checking any eggs you crack for fertility, you are ready to sell!
Proper Collecting Habits: Cleanliness
Selling good quality hatching eggs begins before the eggs are laid. Nest boxes should be very clean and refreshed with straw or shavings every 72 hours. A few eggs will simply be laid dirty but fresh bedding will help keep your hatching eggs extremely clean. You can read how to get cleaner laid eggs in 72 hours or less here.
Wash Your Hands Before Collecting
Your buyers will experience better hatch rates if the eggs are as uncontaminated as possible. Wash your hands before and after collecting hatching eggs and dry your hands well before touching the hatching eggs again. Hatching eggs should not be washed.
Tilt the Eggs
Hatching eggs should be placed pointed end down in an egg carton with one side of the egg carton elevated. Using a book, jar lid or block of wood is the easiest way I have found to do this. The carton should have alternating ends elevated every three to six hours so the eggs inside of them are gently tilted to the left or right. Tilting a couple times per day is sufficient to ensure the air cell is positioned in the large end of the egg and the yolk stays centered.
Photograph the Eggs
This is one of the most enjoyable tasks! Buyers are going to want to see lots of pictures and attractive images really do help sell your eggs. Use a shallow container, such as a farmhousey tray, dough bowl, pulp carton or wooden egg display to cutely showcase what your hens are laying. Some eggs look good on clean white surfaces while others will pop against stained wood or natural linen backgrounds. If you adore earthy, outdoorsy pictures, buy clean craft moss or a bird’s nest to place on the ground to keep the hatching eggs as clean and uncontaminated as possible. (Affiliate links.)
Lighting Tips
Blue eggs tend to look green in pictures and everything photographed in full sun looks glaring. To remedy this, opt to photograph outside in cool shade, out of direct sunlight but with enough natural ambient light that you get good white balance. Cloudy and slightly overcast days tend to be fantastic for taking pictures.
It is Okay to Use Photoshop Fairly
If you know how to use Photoshop or Lightroom, feel free to use these tools to correct any lighting issues with your images. This can help buyers see the real-life colors of your eggs more accurately. No one likes a bait-and-switch image so be as honest as you can with your images and editing.
Don’t Photograph Only the Best or Darkest Eggs
Buyers are relying on your provided images to make a purchasing decision. Give them a very fair representation of the hatching eggs they can expect to receive. Photographing chocolate or olive eggs in moody lighting to make them look even darker is a common breeder trick but might lead to buyers voicing their disappointment in person at pick-up. Avoid this.
Attractively Package the Eggs
Buyers really do want to be handed a picture-perfect carton of hatching eggs that appeals to the eyes and assures them they are not wasting their money. Spending just 55¢ on a cute carton can double the perceived value of your eggs and fetch a higher price per dozen, making the pennies invested well worth it. Stamped pulp cartons are a darling option. There are also some cute pre-printed cartons at a slightly higher price point . (Affiliate link.) I’ve got a number of stamp designs available in my Etsy shop where readers can use coupon code SAVE2 to instantly take $2 off any stamp purchase.
Photograph the Egg Packaging, Too
If you’ve gone to the trouble to nicely package your hatching eggs, show it off! Let buyers see how much love and attention to detail you have put into your egg presentation, which hints that your breeding work is just as careful and thorough. Arrange a cute scene where both your eggs and the decorative carton are visible. Buyers typically want to view their hatching eggs immediately at pick up so tying the cartons closed with twine may be a bit of a hassle. Instead, use a glue dot to affix elements to the carton that still allows it to open and close normally if you want to add embellishments.
Make It Stand Out Online
Leeanna of Farmhouse of Blessings Family Farm has a knack for staging charming scenes that really grab eyeballs! Her beautiful breeding work and alluring packaging generate a lot of excitement among local buyers who eagerly join her seasonal wait list for chicks and hatching eggs.
Pricing
Good quality breeding should never be less than $2 per egg. (You generally cannot feed your flock, purchase packaging and recoup breeding flock care expenses for less than this.) Even at $24 per dozen, you are likely to be flooded with orders for more eggs than your hens can lay. If you are offering a rare breed or highly desirable speckled eggs, it is better to price your eggs in a way where each buyer will get the best quality, cleanliness and colors at the right price that supports your work. You may fill less orders but will bring in more money overall. Since buyers tend to be impatient and want their eggs immediately, you’ll also maintain a shorter wait list with a higher price per dozen.
Dealing with Cheap Buyers
There will come a day when someone asks you the price per dozen for your hard breeding work and they scoff or make a rude comment. You will need to remain patient, upbeat and let this roll off your back. The chicken world has some individuals looking for the best breeding at the lowest, most unsustainable price they can haggle. Their strategy is to insult you then attempt to negotiate prices much lower, using insinuations that they can get “better birds” from a hatchery, feed store or eBay. This is untrue – our breeding projects usually began because we were unhappy with hatchery quality birds and appalled by hatching eggs we received from sub-par breeders. It is perfectly okay to politely thank these people for contacting you and stick to your quoted price. There will be other interested buyers. The cheap people also know this, they are just trying to see how much they can get you to budge. Most intend to benefit from your breeding work by selling chicks hatched from your eggs at exorbitant mark-ups or using your flock’s genetics to breed in competition against you next season. In the long run you are not losing a sale, you are sparing yourself an unnecessary hassle.
Where to Advertise Your Hatching Eggs
Social media is a popular place to display your eggs and funnel interested clicks to your page or website. This tends to require sharing a steady stream of beautiful egg images but it works. Many breeders enjoy that first and last names are visible when individuals contact you through Facebook. Craig’s List is the riskiest place to sell. Buyers names are not visible and most forget to tell you their first name but expect to be given your farm address where they can view your home and entire flock.
Chick Pictures: Needed or Not?
If you have hatched your own eggs and have pictures of the chicks, share them! Buyers love to see what colors they may get. If you haven’t hatched your own yet, try to collect the hatch rates from your buyers whose hatch has completed. (Contacting them 22-24 days after purchase is a great way to collect this data.) Recent hatch rates can help set realistic expectations and assist you in determining if you need to include more free eggs to cover any reduction in fertility.
Helping New Hatchers Who Contact You
Sometimes your eggs are just too tempting and a buyer who has been on the fence about purchasing her first incubator has decided to take the leap! You may get some messages from people asking what incubator you use, where to buy one, and how to hatch chicks using one. Feel free to send them this article I wrote to save yourself the trouble of engaging in a time-consuming back-and-forth dialogue. But be encouraging – they have the potential to be a great repeat buyer!
In Closing
Each spring there are usually more buyers hunting for hatching eggs than there are local breeders offering them. If you have been looking for a way to expand your chicken keeping hobby, selling hatching eggs might be an exciting option to explore! I hope this article has been helpful in getting you started towards photographing, packaging and selling your hatching eggs.
megan jesiolowski says
Hi Ms. Tay i’m trying to make a poster and i need pictures of egg’s
megan Jesiolowski
Tay Silver says
Hi Megan! I’ll email some pretty ones to your mom!
megan jesiolowski says
ok
megan jesiolowski says
thank you
Tammy says
Hi there!
What comes first, the egg or the order for the hatching egg? Lol
How long can you keep the hatching eggs before the viability is lost?
thanks
Tay Silver says
Hi Tammy!
Common advice is that you have the best hatch rates if the eggs are collected and incubated within 7 days or less, having been regularly tilted. Up to 10 days between collection and incubation is considered acceptable, especially for shipped eggs. Some lucky folks have had refrigerated eggs that were 2 weeks old hatch a few chicks. There are so many variables, such as the mother hen’s health, her age and egg quality, how fertile the rooster is, if the eggs have been kept from overheating or being chilled and if the eggs have not been exposed to prolonged sunlight/UV rays that can affect overall viability.
I once did an experiment where I loaded my Nurture Right 360 with 3 week old Easter Egger eggs from my flock that had been sitting at room temperature (around 74 degrees F) and had not been tilted. Not a single one of the 22 eggs developed, not even a little bit. My personal preference is to incubate eggs that are 7 days old or less, up to 10 days old I would consider acceptable and beyond 14 days old I would assume the viability is plummeting quickly. There will always be someone online who says they had a miracle chick hatch from an old egg but if selling hatching eggs, you will upset buyers if the eggs are not as fresh as possible. I hope this helps!