Does that egg look smaller to you?
The struggle behind the scenes in Canada’s egg business
TORONTO — The widespread closure of restaurants and hotels due to COVID19 has scrambled consumer demand for eggs, pushing smaller ones into grocery store coolers and leaving liquid and processed products to pile up in storage.
Though egg processors have yet to experience the type of COVID-19 outbreaks and plant shutdowns that have disrupted the meat industry, the collapse of the hospitality and tourism sectors has cratered demand for liquid eggs, egg patties and other premade products that are a fixture on hotel, cruise ship and brunch buffets.
“The bottom fell right out of the hospitality business just as everyone was building for a busy summer,” said Mike Vanderpol, president of Eggsolutions – Vanderpol Inc., a major processor in Abbotsford, B.C. “We’re carrying a lot of overhead and capacity to supply the market and all of a sudden we have no sales to offset that. It’s a huge lost opportunity.”
Canadian egg farmers produced 740 million dozen eggs in 2019. Roughly 70 per cent of those were graded as large or extra-large in size and sent to grocery stores to be sold as “table eggs.” The remaining 30 per cent of those eggs — 222 million dozen that are often graded as smaller or have a lower shell quality — were directed to egg processors to be broken and manufactured into other products.
MARKET CRUSHED
But travel restrictions and lockdowns have crushed the market for processed products, while simultaneously prompting Canadians to buy more eggs to cook at home, whether for breakfast or baking. The result: Smaller eggs once destined for processing are increasingly being redirected to grocery store coolers.
“Like everyone else, we’ve seen the restaurant business disappear, maybe even more so for the eggs sector, because a lot of people are doing takeout or curbside pickup, but it’s not breakfast, it’s not egg-centric meals,” said Margo Ladouceur, egg sector director for the Canadian Poultry and Egg Processors Council (CPEPC).
“We are vulnerable to having a surplus of eggs particularly on the processing side. On the grading side, demand has been high, because people are at home and they want their big breakfast.”
Vanderpol’s company supplies more than 10 per cent of Canada’s processed egg market, cracking two million dozen eggs every month. Half of those are turned into liquid eggs in his Abbotsford plant, while the rest are dried at an Ontario operation and then used at industrial bakeries or as ingredients in cake mixes and other products.
Though the dried egg factory is managing well, the liquid egg operation — the main part of Vanderpol’s business — has been hit on multiple fronts by the market impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns.