Jane and I went back and forth about whether you guys needed (…or wanted?) a buying guide for eggs. There have been countless magazine articles and web stories attempting to simplify the unreasonably complicated act of choosing which eggs to buy at the grocery store. It’s not what either of us would call riveting content, and maybe the world doesn’t need one more installment.
And yet: eggs are among the most frequently purchased items by American shoppers — they’re in most peoples’ carts, most weeks. That means, over time, the buying choices you make really add up when it comes to your health and your household spending, not to mention animal welfare and the environment. And a lot of the advice out there is confusing or outdated. Plus, as you may have heard, eggs have been really, really expensive lately! So we decided to pull the trigger on this guide.
Here we go!!
The Hunt
When I was growing up, the only choice you needed to worry about when buying eggs was which size you wanted. Nearly all eggs available in grocery stores at the time came from hens confined in battery cages, which allot each bird as little as 67 square inches of space –– about the size of a sheet of printer paper. But in the late 1990s, that started to change: Growing public awareness of animal welfare abuses, concerns about environmental sustainability, and interest in nutrition and food quality were reshaping consumer preferences. A new market was emerging for eggs produced in new ways.
Today, lots of industry terminology, certifications, and health promises greet us in the egg case, and eggs are sold at radically different prices depending on how they’re produced. We sorted through USDA regulations, consulted nutrition studies, spoke to experts, and compared eggs side by side to understand which options best deliver on nutrient density, environmental stewardship, and animal welfare.
Decoding Egg Cartons
Most of our buying guides recommend specific products or brands with a high degree of confidence that these represent the best options most readers are likely to come across wherever they shop for groceries. But the market for premium eggs is still highly regional. In many cases, smaller brands without national distribution can be the best option on the shelf. We couldn’t scour the country to evaluate every local and regional player out there, so we’re doing the next best thing: helping you understand what you’re reading so that you can choose for yourself.
“Cage-free” typically refers to hens housed indoors without cages, though still often in crowded barns with no access to the outdoors.
“Free-range” conjures images of plucky, independent hens roaming wild. In fact, what it usually means is hens housed in barns that have openings leading to some sort of enclosed outdoor space. In the case of eggs labeled “free-range” that aren’t also organic, a concrete “poultry porch” counts toward the requirement. While the term isn’t exactly meaningless…it’s a low bar.
“Pasture-raised” used to be a fuzzy term that wasn’t meaningfully distinguished, legally, from “free-range.” Recently, though, the USDA updated its legal definition of “pastured” and “pasture-raised,” requiring any company that uses it to ensure the birds spend the majority of their lives “on land with rooted vegetative cover” (a.k.a. grasses and other plants). The USDA audits paperwork, but doesn’t do in-person inspections, to confirm that companies are telling the truth. Eggs that carry labels like USDA Organic, Certified Humane, and Animal Welfare Approved have inspectors on their farms at regular intervals to confirm that pasture access claims are legit.
“Organic” eggs come from hens raised without antibiotics, fed organic feed, and given meaningful outdoor access and cage-free living conditions that conform with a slew of other animal welfare provisions. But the chickens that produce organic eggs are not required to have access to vegetation, specifically, unless they are also labeled “pasture-raised.”
