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Eggheads is the go-to podcast for egg industry professionals who are interested in leadership and innovation in the egg world. Host Greg Schonefeld explores the evolving world of modern egg farming, from the latest in cage-free innovations and organic certifications to navigating the economics of large-scale production. Whether you're an egg producer, supplier, or involved in poultry genetics, this show provides the insights and expert discussions you need to thrive in the industry. Crack open the science, strategies, and stories behind the egg industry’s biggest challenges and opportunities.
Kim Rice:
Our programs assume that every egg that's coming into the processing facility has some form of contamination. Whether it's salmonella or a spoilage organism, doesn't matter, we're going to treat them all the same.
Greg Schonefeld:
I'm Greg Schonefeld, and this is Eggheads. Rose Acre Farms is the second-biggest egg producer in the US with grading and processing facilities spread across the country.
Kim Rice:
Somewhere in the number of 15 to 18 at any one time, depending on how you count.
Greg Schonefeld:
And with millions of eggs moving through their operation every day, making sure that everything is done safely and cleanly is a major undertaking. That's where today's guest comes in.
Kim Rice:
I have responsibility for everything once it comes into the processing facility, all the way to the customer. We have another gentleman on our staff who, as he says it is, if it's got feathers and feet, he's responsible, after that, it's me. It's not a very sexy part of the food world.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's Kim Rice, the VP of food safety and quality at Rose Acre. While food safety may not be the sexiest part of the food world, anyone who's ever gotten food poisoning knows how incredibly important it is. With eggs, there are the obvious risks you think about, like salmonella and listeria, but the list of things Kim needs to worry about goes well beyond just illness.
Kim Rice:
We could be creating chemical hazards if we're not applying pesticides properly. You could get metal contamination or plastic contamination.
Greg Schonefeld:
In Kim's 35 years working in food safety, she's had the opportunity to work in a whole bunch of different facilities.
Kim Rice:
I've kind of made my way around the barnyard, spent a little bit of time with produce, a little bit of time in the water, with seafood, but for the most part it's been in animal protein.
Greg Schonefeld:
That experience has given her a really broad view of how food safety regulation works and what's unique about the way it's handled in the egg industry. Today, we'll discuss the different methods for mitigating contamination in eggs, the many different layers of bureaucracy you need to navigate when it comes to food safety, and the thing that seems to keep Kim up at night more than anything else, people. But first, we're starting with the surprising origins of food safety regulation in the US.
Kim Rice:
HACCP is Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. It is simply a risk assessment process that became popular when the space program came on, because having a bout of gastrointestinal distress in space is not a good idea.
Greg Schonefeld:
Oh my gosh. What a nightmare. Yeah.
Kim Rice:
Yeah. You basically take all the assumptions about your product, you draw a flow diagram of how your process works, and then you walk through each process step and list out the biological, chemical and physical hazards that might occur, and assess the risk of whether they rise to the level of being critical, like they're going to cause harm to someone. Then you put things in place to control them. Then you document that, you validate it, and it's just an ongoing way of making sure that the product you put out every day is safe for people to consume.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's really interesting. So obviously you're working in the egg world now, but I understand you had background in pork and beef. Can you compare and contrast a little working in those worlds, versus in eggs?
Kim Rice:
That's a great question. When you look at how beef, pork, and even turkey and broiler plants are run, they can shut down on the weekends, and they can control when things come into the plant so they can do lots of preventative maintenance, or remodeling, and those sorts of things. With eggs, that is not an option. The girls don't take holidays off, and they don't take the weekends off. We run seven days a week, 365 days out of the year. We have to collect eggs, we have to process eggs, much like dairies do. You've got to milk the girls every day. That creates a whole nother set of obstacles that we have to manage, but food safety is food safety.
The sanitation processes are a little bit different, based on the type of equipment, but we still follow the same principles. The eggs themselves, the equipment is pretty simple and the process is pretty straightforward and fluid. Basically, it's all going in one direction. One of the things I had to get used to was there's a single group of equipment. It is not the miles and miles of conveyors and the different cutting mechanisms, and all that sort of stuff you'd have in a slaughter facility or a processing facility. It's all pretty contained and pretty small, so that's different.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay. So it all being in one line, does that make it a little easier, in the egg industry?
Kim Rice:
It is easier to watch, easier to manage. What makes it difficult is we have so much artificial intelligence built into these graders that we use, that they can't be cleaned with a hose and detergents like we would normally use in other food processing facilities. I mean, if you ever get the opportunity to go into a beef plant, or a pork plant, or even a sausage-making plant, literally everything you can hose down from top to bottom. With our equipment, the graders, there are parts of those graders that touch product that we have to use alcohol wipes to clean.
Greg Schonefeld:
Wow.
Kim Rice:
If you've ever had an egg yolk dry on a plate, you put it in the sink and you walked away and you came back an hour later, and you got to scrub it really hard and scrape it sometimes, imagine doing that with an alcohol wipe.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah.
Kim Rice:
Yeah.
Greg Schonefeld:
I get in trouble for that. I got to rinse it right away.
Kim Rice:
It does make it easier.
Greg Schonefeld:
For sure. Valid point. So now we've got a sense of the differences of working in an egg processing facility compared to a slaughterhouse. Eggs are coming through 24/7, and while the process is a bit more streamlined, the tech means that a lot of machinery needs to be washed manually. These aspects of egg production might be annoying for someone running just one facility, let alone an operation as massive as Rose Acre.
Kim Rice:
We have facilities, I think, the number is nine states now. We have inline grading facilities and then we have three breaking facilities and we have three dryers, two for human grade food and one for inedible or animal products. In those facilities, we have at least one, if not two graders. Then, of course, in the breaking facilities, we have a breaking machine, we have pasteurizers, series of silos, et cetera. Then the dryer's basically the same thing: silos, and the big dryer, and then packaging equipment, et cetera.
Greg Schonefeld:
So then I guess with all that scale and variation, what's on your mind when it comes to food safety?
Kim Rice:
People.
Greg Schonefeld:
People, at the end of the day.
Kim Rice:
People. Yeah. I mean, really at the end of the day, it's people and it's making sure that they understand why they're doing what we've asked them to do, and that they do it, whether we're around or not. That's true for whether it's food safety, whether it's biosecurity, whether it's worker safety. We have all these processes in place to make sure that our risk is reduced, and some of it's to protect them as well, but they're human beings, they're going to take the path of least resistance. They're going to be thinking about, "How do I get out of here faster?" Had a fight with my wife or my husband or whatever, the kids are acting up, and they don't pay attention. Then you just got to hope that they've got some muscle memory in there and they do the right thing or they have others on the team who say, "Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. We need to do it the right way."
I used to say, "Well, would you do this at home?" And then I got to know some more people, I thought, "I'm not asking that question anymore." I don't want to know what you're doing at home.
Greg Schonefeld:
According to Kim, when it comes to food safety, people are your greatest resource and it's important for them to understand, not just what they need to do, but why they need to do it, and the potentially awful consequences of not doing it. To get that message across, Kim says clarity and simplicity is paramount.
Kim Rice:
The ability to take very technical information and make it simple, and easy to understand, is one of the things that we grapple with all the time. When I talk about microbes or bacteria, they're like human beings, in that they need food, water, and shelter to grow and to survive. The food is the egg, any egg meat we leave laying around. The water is any moisture we have in the facility. Then the environment is the temperature. When we ask you to keep things clean, so that means take away their food source. We ask you to keep things moving, and keep them right, and get them cold quickly. All of those things lead into creating a hostile environment, or an environment where those bacteria won't grow anymore. I think that's a pretty simplistic way to describe what's happening in our process and what we're asking them to do, and why we're asking them to do it.
A lot of times I tell people, and it's not meant to be rude, but I say, "If you can't explain it to a third-grader, it's too complicated."
Greg Schonefeld:
I mentioned off the top that food safety goes way beyond foodborne illness, but when it comes to eggs, there's definitely one type of bacteria that seems to get a whole lot of attention.
Kim Rice:
Salmonella is the big one. It's not necessarily salmonella, in general, it's what's the next one. The industry has been focused on Enteritidis for so long because that's what the regulation is written around, is Salmonella Enteritidis. But there have been other serovars that have reared their head that we have seen in egg, and egg products potentially, that have caused illness, which don't act like Enteritidis. All the things we have in place, perhaps for Enteritidis, we have to rethink what are we doing for these others?
Greg Schonefeld:
When you talk serovars, what does that mean? Are you talking almost different strands of salmonella?
Kim Rice:
This is the way I talk about it, and I'm sure there's a microbiologist out there that's just absolutely going to cringe when I say it this way. Think about dogs, right? You've got dogs. Then within dogs, you've got golden retrievers, and shepherds, and terriers. Let's take Labrador retrievers, you've got three different colors. You've got yellow, black and chocolate. It's kind of like that. So salmonella is dogs, and then you've got all these other dogs, and then underneath there, you've got other dogs. That's what I mean when I talk about serovars.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's great.
Kim Rice:
Does that make sense?
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Thanks for also showing what it means to explain like I'm a third-grader, because you did a great job of that.
I realized for all that talk about salmonella and eggs, I had no idea where it actually came from or how it makes its way into the production process, so I put that question to Kim.
Kim Rice:
Salmonella is ubiquitous in the environment. If you were to go outside and pick up a handful of dirt, you'd probably find some in there, along with some other things. In eggs, most of it is vertically transmitted, which means the hen becomes infected with it. It doesn't affect her per se, but then she transfers it to the eggs, and so it's internally in the egg. Now, there's not a whole lot I can do about it once it comes to me, to get rid of it, other than cook it, which then falls to the consumer to do when you're talking about shell eggs.
You can also get salmonella contamination in the environment. So if she is infected with it, or has it and is carrying it, and she is pooping, she's putting it in the environment. If those eggs come into contact with that, they can carry them through into processing, which is where my crew and the operations crew comes into play because the hurdles that we've put in place, in processing, how we wash, and what we wash with, and then how we sanitize with a liquid sanitizer and a UV light, et cetera, those things go towards knocking that external contamination risk down. Then we put them into the cooler and put them at a temperature that salmonella doesn't like to grow in. It may survive, but it's not going to grow and it's not going to grow to a level that's going to make people sick.
Greg Schonefeld:
We had a guest come on, and he mentioned that he likes his eggs very runny. He said it's maybe one out of 10,000 that you get salmonella, and he's willing to take that risk.
Kim Rice:
Buyer be warned or beware is that if you like your egg sunny side up, you're taking your health into your own hands.
Greg Schonefeld:
I see. If salmonella is inside an egg, it's really the consumer who mitigates that risk by cooking it thoroughly. But if it's in the environment, it's the processes Kim has put in place that make it difficult for the infection to get into the facility, and end up in a carton bound for the supermarket. While a lot of these protocols are put in place by producers themselves, they're also codified in a piece of legislation we've talked about on the show before called the egg rule.
Kim Rice:
The egg rule focuses on what's going on on the production side. It focuses on the testing, at certain points in the life cycle of the bird, you're testing the environment and your daily running your pest control program. Then it goes through processing and it comes out the other side of processing and the egg rule kicks in again. That you got to store those eggs, within 36 hours, at 45 degree ambient temperature. If there's a positive in the environment, then you have to start testing eggs and you have to hold all of the eggs you've processed until those egg test results have come back, or you can divert all of those eggs, during that timeframe as you're doing the egg testing, to further processing, or breaking where they are broken and pasteurized so that they are sure to be cooked to the right temperature.
Greg Schonefeld:
So these protocols are incredibly effective, but Kim says that while processes are great, the real key to preventing contamination is consistency.
Kim Rice:
I assume every egg that is coming into the processing facility, and our programs assume that every egg that's coming into the processing facility, has some form of contamination, whether it's salmonella, or a spoilage organism, doesn't matter. We're going to treat them all the same, and we're going to make sure that we are washing them properly, at the right temperatures, with the right concentrations, with the right pH, and that we are then rinsing them and sanitizing them with a liquid sanitizer. If the equipment, which I think all of ours at this point have UV light, we're moving that direction and I'm pretty sure we're there now. We also then have a second control point with a second hurdle for the salmonella to get through. Then we get them through the rest of processing, which is the rest of the grading, and the weighing, and getting them in the package, and getting them in the cooler as quickly as possible.
Most of the eggs are in a cooler and on the road within 24 hours of being laid.
Greg Schonefeld:
I imagine that cuts down quite a bit of risk, how quickly it gets to a cooler these days.
Kim Rice:
Well, how quickly it gets to a cooler and how quickly it gets to the consumer. So it absolutely does cut down on the risk, or at least the long-term risk. Eggs are a lot like perishable produce. A lot of produce has a shelf life of 21 days or less. Eggs have a slightly longer one, but because it's considered a perishable product, they are consumed relatively quickly, as a general rule.
Greg Schonefeld:
All these processes to prevent contaminants, it may seem like overkill, but on the other hand, salmonella contamination is way less common than it used to be, so the results sort of speak for themselves.
Kim Rice:
It does not happen very often, and that's because of the preventive controls that we've put in place. It starts with our breeding stock, and our hatchery process, and our cleaning between flocks. We are trying to eliminate salmonella from even showing up in those houses. We're doing absolutely everything we can to make sure that the breeding stock we get is free and clear, making sure that the hatchery is free and clear of it, so that all the hens that come in are clean to begin with.
Greg Schonefeld:
Interesting. Wow.
Kim Rice:
So it's very much like a biosecurity program, just focused on something different.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. That's really tough to manage though, because it's kind of like where you don't do it a day and you don't feel it right away, or you only feel it when there's a problem. I could see where that's very tough to get people moving on that, and consistent, and disciplined. I mean, it takes a lot of all of that to do this right.
Kim Rice:
It is every single day. Every day, every minute. People are people. "Well, I didn't work out today. So what? My knee feels fine. I don't need to take the painkiller." Then two hours later, you're ready to somebody just chop it off because it hurts, because you're not staying on top of that management.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. There's no immediate feedback to what you're doing.
Kim Rice:
Right. Exactly. Getting people to think preventively, and behave preventively all the time, you can't rely just on them, which makes it difficult. That means you've got to build your facilities, you've got to build your programs, you've got to build everything where it doesn't allow them, or makes it even more difficult for them to do something different than what you want them to do.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Makes sense. Maybe just touch quickly on processed egg products. We talked about dried eggs, so that would be a different topic than salmonella, but I mean, what's different there?
Kim Rice:
So processed products, so liquid product and dried products, and even if you were to buy hard-boiled eggs, or pre-cooked omelets, or all those things, so that, on top of the salmonella potential, then you have listeria in the manufacturing environment, that you have to be aware of and have preventive programs for, which is mainly sanitation and sanitary design of equipment and the building. Then you also have physical contamination that you're managing through making sure that none of the equipment's falling apart, or you're getting nuts, and bolts, or shavings, whatnot in that product. You have things like magnets, and filters, and metal detection in place to help you manage that. Then you also have chemical contamination, which is where you're making sure that your sanitation processes, you're washing things properly, and you're making sure that you're testing incoming ingredients for any potential residues, or at least relying on some sort of testing to make sure that that's not happening.
Yeah. When you get into further processing the things that you have to start managing, the list gets a little bit longer, but you have more tools as well. When you are further processing, you are cooking it, so you have a lethality step that you can apply to reduce, or even completely eradicate whatever that hazard of concern is, from a microbiological standpoint. From a chemical standpoint, and from a physical standpoint, cooking, it's not going to fix either one of those. In fact, it's probably going to make it worse, but you have other hurdles in place to take care of those things.
Greg Schonefeld:
I do want to talk compliance, because that's such an exciting topic, but no, I do want to talk compliance. I guess maybe you could compare and contrast a little bit regulation in eggs, versus beef, and pork in your past.
Kim Rice:
Yeah. I would say that eggs are the hot potato of the regulatory world. For beef, and pork, and turkey, and broilers, it's very simple. The Food Safety and Inspection Service, FSIS, which is part of USDA, they are the agency that regulates those facilities. They are in those facilities every day. Those facilities don't run without those people present. All other food, including shell eggs, are under FDA. FDA is not in your facilities every day. FDA says, "Here are the rules, good luck." Either we will come in, or a state or local health department will come in on behalf of us and we will audit your facility and determine whether the real FDA needs to come in, because FDA is not set up the same way that FSIS is.
A lot of what we do, in shell eggs, is on our own and on our owner. Clearly, as a good operator, it doesn't behoove us to do anything but the right thing and to be compliant. Now, I'm going to really put a wrinkle in this, okay?
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah.
Kim Rice:
So if we are making liquid product or dried product, which we are, that falls under FSIS. So the same folks that do the beef plants, and the pork plants, and the broiler, and turkey plants, they also are responsible for those. In my three breaking plants, which are located on farms with a shell plant there as well, I've got AMS, and FDA, on the shell side, and I've got FSIS on the breaking side. Now, if I'm making a hard-boiled egg, or I'm making an omelet, which we don't make, but if I were, that would fall back to FDA.
Greg Schonefeld:
Interesting. That's surprising.
Kim Rice:
I have my serial killer murder chart in my office that says, "Well, if it's this, it's this, but if you've done this and that to it, then it's this."
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Like the detectives, how they have all those strings tied up on the wall.
Kim Rice:
Yeah, exactly. That's right. That's right.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's hilarious.
Kim Rice:
That's how I determine who I've got to call and say, "Hey. I'm so sorry, we screwed up, but here's how we're going to fix it."
Greg Schonefeld:
Sure.
Kim Rice:
For the most part, the agencies that we work with are very good to work with. Some of them can be pretty stuck in their ways and thoughts, but I have found that if you have a story to tell that's rational, reasonable, and you have the science to back it, nine times out of 10, you're fine, and you can work through anything that happens.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. On the breakers, where you've got the FSIS there, are they there daily then, just like beef?
Kim Rice:
Yep. They're on, what's called, a patrol. They show up at some point during the day. They may be there for pre-operational inspection, or they may come in halfway through the shift to see what's going on, check paperwork, observe us in action and make sure that we're doing all the things that we're supposed to do. Yeah. They're there every day.
Greg Schonefeld:
I mean, do you have a preference there? I guess I'm sure there's advantages and disadvantages to both. I mean, if they're there every day, then you don't have to worry as much. It kind of shifts some responsibility. I guess, how do you look at that?
Kim Rice:
Well, I don't know that it shifts responsibility because you're never going to be ... At the end of the day, a regulatory agency is never going to stand up in a court of law and go, "Oh, yeah. It's our fault. We let them do it." That's not going to happen.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah.
Kim Rice:
At the end of the day, it says Rose Acre Farms on the sign, so we are responsible, regardless. I tell my team that all the time, "I don't care what your inspector said you could or could not do, we're not going to do that, because it's not the right thing to do." We're not going to do something stupid. It does make it easier, because you understand what the rules of the road are, to have an agency or a regulatory agency that is present all the time.
My experience with regulators is you've got to spend some time establishing a relationship with them, when times are good, because something is going to happen. No matter how much you plan, how many great programs you have in place, something is going to go wrong at some point, because we're dealing with a biological process that we're trying to control. It behooves you, as an organization, to have relationships with those people so that the first time they're getting to know you is not in the middle of a crisis. Making sure that you've shared with them how you approach compliance, when you share with them, "Here are our programs, here are all the things we're trying to do to make sure we don't get ourselves in trouble." My experience has been, when you do that, your ability to navigate a crisis and come out the other side, still in control of your destiny, is much higher than if you don't take the time to cultivate those relationships.
They've got to be real relationships. I'm not saying just go in and glad hand them and act like some slimy politician. I'm talking about going in and really getting to know these people, and being open and honest about what you're doing, and how you're trying to get better.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. The way I'm understanding that is, when it's done right, it's more of a partnership.
Kim Rice:
Exactly.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Just want to touch on one more thing on compliance. I mean, the paperwork end, is that a pretty big part of the job?
Kim Rice:
It is a huge part of the job. I would tell you, it has changed so much since I started. When I started, I tell people, you had a Big Chief and a Dixon Ticonderoga. I'm aging myself. A Big Chief is a yellow notepad and a Dixon Ticonderoga is the pencil, so that's how you ...
Greg Schonefeld:
Thanks for explaining that.
Kim Rice:
Yeah, because I saw your eyes going, "What the hell?"
Greg Schonefeld:
If you say so.
Kim Rice:
Yeah. That's how old I am. Your programs and your records are how you tell your story and your history. They are what you use to defend yourself. And so making sure that you are keeping good records, clear records, records that make sense to people who don't know anything about your operation, eggs in general, it's important to make sure that they are clear and easy to understand, that they flow through your process so that you can lay them out and they will tell your story that we did A, we did B, we did C, we did D, we did E. We followed our program. When things went wrong, because they will go wrong, when things went wrong, here are the things we did to correct it, to regain control, what we did about product that was part of it. My team's responsible for making sure that those records are maintained, they're reviewed, they're complete, and they tell our story in the right way.
Greg Schonefeld:
If you could change one thing tomorrow in regulation that would preserve safety, but make the system work better, what would that be?
Kim Rice:
Is this the Kim Rice unemployed answer or is ... I still got 10 years to go before I'm really ready to go.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. You could give me both and we can cut it if it comes out too bad.
Kim Rice:
Yeah. There you go. I think one of the things that frustrates me about FDA regulations, in general, is there are a lot of exemptions. If you have two employees and you slaughter two animals a year and you want to ship them across state lines, you have to meet all of the FSIS regulations. There's no variance or exemption if you're very, very small, if you want to ship product across state lines. In the FDA world, and I'm not talking just eggs, I'm talking all of the FDA products, if you're considered very small, you don't have to comply with food safety regulations. Now, you have to comply with the act, but you could do a lot of harm, long before they ever catch up with you. I think FDA changing how they exempt facilities, to me, would be a huge improvement.
Greg Schonefeld:
Interesting. If I'm at the store, could I be buying from a producer that's exempt in some way and not know it?
Kim Rice:
Yeah.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay.
Kim Rice:
Absolutely.
Greg Schonefeld:
That was not your answer that gets you fired, right?
Kim Rice:
Yes, that's correct.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay. Well, then I'll have to ask you in 10 years for that one then.
For all the different food safety risks that are out there, it's extremely rare for people to get sick from eating eggs. That's because people like Kim are working to make sure that these protocols and processes become reflexive for her employees, so that even on a day when they're preoccupied or sleep-deprived, muscle memory kicks in and they still do the right thing. The egg business is governed by a patchwork of agencies, each with their own rigid guidelines and different ways of ensuring compliance. It's Kim's job to make sure Rose Acre, with all their different facilities and products, is adhering to all of it and making sure that all products reaching consumers are treated with the same standard of care. As a result, most of us will go through our lives eating eggs, or egg products, every day without ever knowing what it's like to get infected with salmonella or listeria.
Now, I can understand if all this talk about food safety puts you off your appetite a bit, but for all her work in the field, Kim's appetite for eggs seems totally intact.
All right, Kim. Well, I have one last question for you.
Kim Rice:
Sure.
Greg Schonefeld:
How do you prefer your eggs?
Kim Rice:
How do I prefer my eggs? It depends on the day and the dish. I will tell you that I like a jammy yolk.
Greg Schonefeld:
A jammy yoke. Okay. I thought you were going to say well done.
Kim Rice:
Well, but I also like a medium rare burger, so go figure.
Greg Schonefeld:
You're like the orthopedic surgeon that owns a trampoline.
Kim Rice:
Or I have confidence in the people I'm buying from. I know those people and I know that they're doing absolutely everything they can to make sure the product they are putting on the market is safe.
Greg Schonefeld:
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a colleague or friend. Word of mouth really helps us to grow the show. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Until next time, I'm Greg Schonefeld and we'll talk to you soon.