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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.
Craig England:
If you look at the number of people that were on a 200 case an hour egg grader in 1984, now we're running egg graders that are four times that capacity, 800 cases an hour. There's actually less people running four times the amount of eggs that were run through at that time.
Greg Schonefeld:
I'm Greg Shonefeld and this is Eggheads. The pace of innovation in the egg industry over the last few decades has been incredible and nowhere is that more evident than egg processing, where automation has allowed for eggs to be graded with greater speed and accuracy than ever before. These advancements completely changed the industry from the top down, and today's guest had a front row seat for all of it.
Craig England:
Yeah, so I actually went to trade school for electrical, electronic controls and panel building and that.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's Craig England, formerly the president of Sanovo Technology USA and later the president of Moba USA, two of the most well-known egg processing technology companies in the U.S. and worldwide. But Craig's career in eggs started more than 40 years ago with a fateful phone call.
Craig England:
Diamond was the largest producer of egg graders in North America, called me and just said, "Hey, got a job. Are you interested in coming in and interviewing?"
Greg Schonefeld:
Craig's from Detroit, and he figured he'd work at Diamond for a few years before following his friends into the automotive industry. But once he got a taste of egg, he was hooked.
Craig England:
And that was 1984, and I've been in the industry ever since.
Greg Schonefeld:
In that time, Craig saw technology come online that could process eggs at speeds that were previously unthinkable. Today, he's going to walk us through the evolution of that tech and the possibilities that unlocked in an industry where labor is often hard to find and even harder to keep.
Craig England:
So yeah, Diamond had just introduced a grader that really revolutionized the grading industry. It was the first mass produced computer controlled grader and it ran 200 cases an hour, which at that time that was lightning fast. And for somebody who'd never seen eggs produced before, I remember going in the first couple times I saw them, it was just like, "Oh my gosh, where are all these eggs going to go? " I mean, 200 cases an hour was what, 20 eggs a second or something like that. So if you've never seen egg processing occurring, it's pretty mind blowing. So I started, they had just developed that machine, I think there was about 10 of them out. And my job for the first couple years was basically to go around and fix the things that were challenges and needed to be redesigned and basically kept the things going. So I started, I was on an airplane going all around the country and then around the world fixing the egg graders and coming back with solutions on how to make some design changes in that for the long term.
Greg Schonefeld:
So at this point we're talking the '80s, right, mid to late '80s?
Craig England:
Yeah, it was 1984.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay. And so if you were to paint a picture, I guess, of what a modern egg packing plant looked like at that time, what would it be? I mean, we've talked to some guests about, at a certain point, a 30,000 bird house was big. I mean, are we a little bit beyond that in the '80s by this time? I guess can you just paint a picture, I guess, of what a farm looked like at that time?
Craig England:
Yeah. It's interesting because the majority of the processing plants at that time were offline. There was inline grading occurring that was really ramping up at that time, but it was still the majority were offline plants. So the production was still being done at smaller farms, farm packers and eggs being brought into the processing plant, which is interesting because there's kind of a move back towards that with some of the challenges that we face with AI and that. But they were really dictated by what the capacity of the machine was. And again, it was 200 cases an hour. So I mean, a 200 case an hour machine could handle a million egg facility, an inline facility or that. But back in '84, '85, that would have been a big facility. There were some, but there weren't a whole lot of them.
Greg Schonefeld:
So it would have been at an offline processing plant likely processing a million eggs, but from different farms.
Craig England:
Exactly. The majority of the customers had some of their own production. Let's say maybe they had 4, 500,000 birds of their own at multiple sites somewhere. And then they were also bringing eggs in from other producers. They were buying them or they'd have contracts with them. Again, it's very similar to what we're kind of seeing some of the facilities that are being built today going back to.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Well, this is a pretty layman's question, but what does grading entail at this juncture?
Craig England:
Basically, it's the process of taking the eggs and washing them. In North America, at least, we wash the eggs, clean them. We used to reoil the eggs and seal them, but that was because the eggs were not as fresh as they are today when they're being processed. But it's checking them for defects, whether there's dirt on them, whether they're cracked, if they have blood in them, and then sizing them. The way that the eggs are separated and sold in the grocery stores is by size and that's done by weight.
Greg Schonefeld:
So this Diamond product would do all of that?
Craig England:
So the Diamond product back in 1984 required inspectors to manually look for dirts, manually look for cracks, manually look for bloods in the eggs. The thing it did do is it weighed the eggs and separated them into different packing lanes that then got packed into the cartons, but all of the inspection back at that time was done by humans. And because of that, it really limited the speed at which the machines could go. That really handcuffed being able to make higher capacity machines, which then in turn would lead to more birds at the facilities. So until automation started coming in, that was really the bottleneck of being able to increase capacities and make facilities larger.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay. So then when people were manually checking for cracks and bloods, how were they doing that?
Craig England:
So they would stand in what was called a candling booth and there were high intensity lights that would shine up from below and illuminate the egg so that they could see if there was a crack in the shell or if there was a blood or if there was dirts on it. So it was all done by humans and they had a little programming stick or programming wand that they would touch the eggs and then the machine would keep track of them and separate those from the good eggs. They had to maintain a quality level that USDA had put in place. If a crack got into a pack and got to the store, it wasn't the end of the world, but if it was higher than a certain percentage, the inspectors that were in the plants would then restrict those eggs and the customer would have to then rerun those eggs through the machine, which was very costly, very timely, whether it was cracks or dirts, any of that, or even if the sizes weren't right.
So what would then happen would be if an inspector let too many cracks go or too many dirts, of course they would get reprimanded. And then anything that looked like a crack or anything, they would program them all. So now instead of getting too many cracks in the pack, they would be putting good eggs into the cracked area, which was very costly. That's just human nature, right? I'm not going to make a mistake, so I'm going to overcorrect and it would come at a cost. And when the automation came in and was introduced, it allowed for a more consistent candling operation and again, allowed for us to increase capacities.
Greg Schonefeld:
So was Diamond sort of the major player at this time?
Craig England:
Diamond was the biggest player in North America. Diamond back in the mid '80s probably were 65% of the market. And by the time the end of the '90s rolled around, Diamond was 95% of the installed machines here in North America. In the late '80s, I believe it was Marcus Rust who was talking to the president of Diamond at that time, Jim Nield, and said, "This is our biggest problem. We just can't deal with this crack detection. And boy, if you guys could figure this out." And we went to work on it at Diamond. It probably took about a year from the time we first started talking about it until we had it in the field. That really made the change in the ag grading market was the automatic crack detection because you could then increase the speed of the grader. You had consistency with the inspection being done regularly, not overpulling, not having eggs retained by the inspector.
So that was in the late '80s, and then probably about 8 or 10 years later was the introduction of the dirt detector, which checked the outside of the shell for imperfections, for dirts or that. Those two things basically took the candler job from being a very difficult job to staff up to being a very simple job. They were then just looking for any obvious abnormalities and they were checking for bloods, which bloods are not a high percentage. They used to be years ago, but over time that's been reduced. So it made it a lot easier for those employees to do the inspection. And again, it allowed us to increase the capacities of the machine, which allowed for the customers to invest in more birds on each site so that they had efficiencies of scale throughout their operation.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's really interesting. So it went to the cracks first, not necessarily maybe because that was the easiest thing to solve from a tech standpoint, but because it was the thing that most needed solving because humans had so much trouble with it.
Craig England:
Right. It was a bigger problem. It was more difficult for the candlers to inspect those regularly. But the crack detector is actually done with sound and we would roll the egg over these Piezoe crystal transmitters and it would check to see that the sound of that shell was the same all the way around. If you take a good egg and you tap it all the way around, you'll hear the same tone all the way around. If you have a crack, you'll hear a different tone. That's how the detection was done. And the idea of being able to detect is one thing, but then to put it in an environment where you're having eggs roll across it, where you may have eggs leaking onto it, where you have to wash it and clean it every day, making it effective and work long term in the environment that it was in was really the bigger challenge than actually being able to detect if an egg was cracked or not.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay. Interesting. So the idea of using sound, who came up with that?
Craig England:
So that was an engineer who, gosh, I don't even know how many patents he has. He worked for Diamond for years. His name was George Bliss, and he developed a lot of innovations over the years that are either still being used or were the basis for further advancement that we're using today.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay. So the crack detection got solved, then the dirt detection. So you said on the crack detection that the first solution was that sound detection system, but it was hard to keep clean. What did that evolve to?
Craig England:
We had different iterations of the crack detector where it became more waterproof washed down, made it easier to maintain it through the years. There's probably, I don't know, four or five iterations of that. And now you're seeing, today, you're seeing the move to a vision-based crack detection as well as the vision-based dirt detection. So the technology in vision automation has grown so much that you get images of the shells of the eggs that are really clear, really detailed, really fine. So you can make that analysis on that. And that technology of vision where you're not actually touching ... The egg is not touching the sensors or the detection systems makes for a more reliable system.
Greg Schonefeld:
Now that Craig's given us a good overview of the type of tech being used to make the grading process faster and more accurate, I wanted to get his description of what an inline processing plant looks like today and how they might function differently than the ones that were around when he joined the industry.
Craig England:
The ones that are investing in the automation that's out there today, which a lot of people are, the eggs come in on an inline machine, go through the egg washer, they go through the inspection systems, which are all done automatically. There are no operators or any type of inspectors looking at the eggs before that. Then they go through, they're sorted. They go into the packing lanes where the eggs are put into the cartons or to the trays. Then those are transferred back into case packers where the cartons are picked up three or four at a time and put into the corrugated cases or the plastic cases that then are moved down another line, which go to a automatic taping machine, and in many cases, labeling machines, so it labels where those eggs came from.
A system that allows the customer to trace back when those eggs were packed, what farm they came from, all of the pertinent information if there was ever some kind of a recall that was required that they could narrow down to a much smaller level of where those eggs potentially came from. So that's labeled, put on, and it goes through and there's an automatic palletizing system where it collects these cases and picks them up, puts them onto the pallets, fills the pallets. When the pallets are filled, they roll off into a machine where they put shrink wrap around them and then they're handed off usually to the people who manually load the trucks.
So the interesting thing, Greg, is if you look at the number of people that were on a 200 case an hour egg grader in 1984 that were required to get the eggs through the system, now we're running egg graders that are four times that capacity, 800 cases an hour. When they put on the automation that's available to them, there's actually less people running four times the amount of eggs that were run through at that time. I used to talk about the person who was loading the trucks at a facility when it was all done manually, on a two million bird operation, they would be loading four or five semi trailers full of eggs every day and they were picking these 50 pound boxes up and stacking them onto pallets and that.
And they were doing everything manually, everything by hand. And I used to say to some of the customers, I'd say, "Whoever hires those guys has got to be incredible. Because if you told them that, Hey, you two guys are going to lift enough boxes to load four of those semi-trailers at the end of every day," they'd go, "I don't want this job." But that's what they would wind up doing. And now a high percentage of the plants are doing that with automatic palletizing.
Greg Schonefeld:
Very interesting. What's manual in the process today?
Craig England:
Loading the packing lanes up with the individual carton material so that it gets dispensed and then the eggs are put into it. Let's say smaller volume packs or that, there's not a lot of small eggs, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to put an expensive automatic packaging machine back there when you're only packing 10 of those cases a day or whatever, and it's just sitting there waiting, waiting, waiting. So some of the small specialty things are the very low volume items, taking the eggs on the offline operation out of the cooler and putting them into what's called a de-palletizer so that it can be unloaded and put onto the grader, that's still fairly manual. So there's stuff going on around that still requires some manual intervention, but it's much lower.
Greg Schonefeld:
What role did technology in the egg processing side of things play in farms being able to go from once upon a time 30,000 birds is big to what we see today?
Craig England:
The first big innovation was the automatic crack detection and automatic dirt detection. Getting rid of that human error potential and really what the limitation was of a human to be able to inspect eggs that were going by really opened the door for there to be more of a push for, "Okay, I've got this building, I've got these people, I've got this facility, I want to add two more barns or three more barns." Then the push came from the customers to go, "Well, you need a faster machine. 300's not fast enough. I need 400." So the good thing was there was always a project to work on. You never got to the point where they said, "Nope, everything's perfect. We don't need anything else."
Greg Schonefeld:
Gets back to listening to the customer then.
Craig England:
Exactly. Yeah.
Greg Schonefeld:
I was going to ask, what impact does that have when you're increasing your cases per hour?
Craig England:
Well, I think one of the metrics that people look at is how many cases per man hour or how many dozens per man hour or whatever it is, they have a metric that they use to compare how efficient the plants are and of course how much cost there is per dozen of labor. Today's a little different, but in normal times, the margins on dozens of eggs, you're talking a penny. A penny a dozen is a big swing for the industry at times. And if you can cut a half a cent of labor or a quarter cent of labor out of that, it's really important to them and shows up on the bottom line, so.
Greg Schonefeld:
Do you think this technology enhancement drove up the number of birds on site or do you think there were other forces pushing it that way that kind of drove the adaptation of the technology?
Craig England:
I don't think it drove it. I think it allowed it to be driven, Greg. I think there's other factors that were probably more impactful when it comes to having the birds in one facility, whether it's because of the transportation costs, having a feed mill on site that you could utilize fully across whatever it was, two million, three million birds versus bringing feed in from the outside. I think there were other variables that were more impactful for having higher production in one facility. But I do believe the technology and the automation advancements allowed them to look at that being a possible thing to do, so.
Greg Schonefeld:
Interesting. To this point, we've talked a lot about processing and how it's increased the efficiency of layer operations, but one side of the process that always fascinated me was a breaker process. And I understand from talking to Craig that there's also been a ton of innovation on that side of the industry.
Craig England:
It's two knives that are spring loaded and it goes up and it cracks the shell and then it splits it apart and then the product runs past that knife and all of that. So you get a very clean fracture of the shell, so you don't get any shell bits and all of that around. So on the breaking side, Greg, it's really important to have really good separation between the yolk and the whites because some customers only want whites and they want a minimal amount of the yolk in there or fat in there because it changes how the product reacts during baking or cooking or whatever. So when you were looking at the old ones, what would happen is that product would go down the chute and there'd be a little slit and the slit was designed to keep the yolk out of it because it was a heavier product or thicker product than the white.
That's how they separated and the quality was nowhere near what we can produce today. And like on the Sanovo breaker, after it's separated, then they inspect the whites that are in the cup, in that lower cup to make sure that if there was a cracked yolk or something, if any of that yolk got in there that it says, "Nope, I don't want this," the customer wants pure whites, so then it puts that into what's called whole egg where they combine the yolk and the whites back together, which is what you get at the Hampton Inn breakfast thing where it's all in the pre-cooked, the scrambled eggs and all of that, that all comes from the egg breaking lines.
Greg Schonefeld:
What are they doing? Because that looks like a regular egg color. So they're putting the white and the yolk back together or no?
Craig England:
Yep.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay.
Craig England:
So what they do is they separate two products. And then they say, "Okay, we want whatever it is, 30% yolk and 70% white." So then they take that and they can mix that to what the proper mixture is that the customer wants, whether it's for scrambled eggs or for a recipe or whatever it is. Then they put the two back together, pasteurize the product in a lot of cases and sometimes add sugar, add salt, whatever the customer wants. But the first thing, the most important thing is to get pure product, the whites from the yolks, and then you can mix back whatever percentage works for the customer so that you have a consistent product all the time.
Greg Schonefeld:
Wow. And I'm also amazed, I guess, on whether it's the grading or the breaking and watching some of those videos that it's like these metal machines handling these fragile eggs, but they can do it.
Craig England:
Yeah. Well, I always used to say that back in the day, Diamond only made a grader, but if it wasn't tuned up and working properly, we did have a breaker as well because later on we developed a breaker.
Greg Schonefeld:
Always good to have a backup plan.
Craig England:
Yeah.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah.
Craig England:
But when you talk about the changes like from '84 to today, the machines in the grading plants that were made in the mid-80s up through the '90s were painted machines. And I think the late '90s was when the push was to go over to stainless steel machines, more washed down. So the sanitation today versus 40 years ago in 1985 is so much better today than what we had back then. You've got machines that have CIP, which is clean in place. They basically have a tank of water and spray all of the areas of the machine that can get contaminated or that at the end of every day. So along with the automation is just the sanitation that has been implemented into the industry over the last 40 years.
Greg Schonefeld:
So now with all these improvements, advancements and efficiencies gained, do you think the processing side has run out of major problems to solve and the big advancements need to now happen in the barn?
Craig England:
You know, that's a good question. Every time that a problem was solved, we would always say, "Well, that's it. It's got to be done." There's always the joke or whatever you'd hear from customers says, "I want a lights out plant that basically meant I come in the morning, turn it on, puts all the eggs, takes them all out, puts them on the truck, and I don't have any people." You know what I mean? So until we're there, I think there's always going to be a problem to solve. What'll be the biggest one that'll have, again, the biggest impact for the customers will change over time, but I think there's always going to be opportunity, well, at least in my lifetime, which there will continue to be opportunity to improve the efficiencies in the operations.
Greg Schonefeld:
After talking with Craig on the Sales Legends panel last fall, I heard enough about processing to know I needed to follow up with him for a deeper dive. I found it useful to hear how things used to work, the manual processes, risk of error, and the heavy manual lifting to load trucks. On one hand, it's crazy to think these huge heavy machines are needed to work these small, fragile eggs. On the other hand, when you hear the complete evolution and pair that with the industry shift to larger inline production sites, it all makes complete sense. And now, having covered the way technology has altered the course of the industry, just one question remains. Craig, how do you prefer your eggs?
Craig England:
I love a good omelet like any egg man, but if I had my last meal, it'd probably be over medium.
Greg Schonefeld:
Man, would your last meal be eggs?
Craig England:
I think it would have to be, right? If I have my choice, I mean, I'd have to go out on that note.
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, and to make sure you don't miss an episode, follow us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Until next time, I'm Greg Shonefeld and we'll talk to you soon.