Egg-celent News: Delicious, Farm Fresh Eggs Delivered

At the start of the 2021 school year, 4P began delivering eggs from the Piedmont Progressive Farmers Group (PPFG) to Elon University. This may seem like an everyday transaction between a food service operator and local farmers, but lots of legwork went on behind the scenes to make this Good Food connection! Did you know that most large-format dining operations use liquid eggs, as in whole eggs that have been pre-cracked into a container for ease of use? When Elon decided to make the switch to in-shell eggs sourced from PPFG, they also had to plan for the additional time and labor that goes into cracking hundreds of dozens of eggs per week. 

When universities choose to source food from local farmers, they create high-volume, consistent orders that other customers typically aren’t able to commit to. The students at Elon have been going through an average of 300 dozen eggs per week and are eager for more in the spring semester. Large orders from universities can be a sustainable source of farmer income for a large portion of the year, but the seasonal school breaks leave farmers with excess product and nowhere for that product to go. Chickens don’t stop laying eggs just because students are on winter break! 

The egg-cellent news is, due to 4P’s diverse market channels, we can continue to buy PPFG’s eggs and sell them to other wholesale customers and in our online grocery store. These eggs meet the standards for our pasture-raised eggs item in the shop. The PPFC requires every farm in the co-op to meet certification standards to ensure they are offering healthy, quality products. They source pastured-raised, free-range, all-natural brown eggs from the farms in their network, advocating for the humane treatment of laying hens and expect their suppliers to uphold the same standards. PPFC also believes that animals should not be fed animal by-products, given hormones or certain medications.

Piedmont Progressive Farmers Group is a cooperative organization of black farmers founded in 2016 in the Caswell County area of North Carolina. 4P joined forces with the group through our Equitable Food Sourcing Initiative in an effort to support historically marginalized farmers by connecting them to new market opportunities.