Farming & sourcing · 6 min read
Cage-free, free-range, and pasture-raised: what's the real difference?
Cage-free means hens aren't kept in the small battery cages traditionally used in industrial egg production, but it doesn't guarantee outdoor access. Cage-free hens can still be raised entirely indoors in large, crowded barns — it's a real welfare improvement over caged housing, but it's a lower bar than many shoppers assume.
Free-range requires some outdoor access, but the regulations around how much space, for how long, and what that outdoor area actually looks like are fairly loose and vary by certifier. In practice, "some access to the outdoors" can mean anything from a spacious pasture to a small fenced dirt patch attached to a crowded barn.
Pasture-raised is the most space-intensive of the common labels, typically requiring a meaningful amount of outdoor square footage per hen — often cited around 108 square feet per bird under third-party certifications like Certified Humane, though the exact number depends on which certifier is being used. It's generally considered the closest label to how people picture "farm eggs" when they imagine hens actually roaming outside.
Farming & sourcing · 4 min read
Why do egg yolks vary so much in color?
Yolk color is driven almost entirely by diet, not health or freshness. Hens that eat a diet richer in carotenoids — found in things like marigold petals, corn, and green forage — produce deeper orange yolks. Hens on a more standard grain-based feed tend to produce paler yellow yolks.
This means yolk color isn't a reliable indicator of nutritional quality or how the hen was raised on its own. A deep orange yolk often does correlate with more outdoor pasture access, simply because pasture-raised hens eat more greens and insects, but the color itself is really a story about what the hen ate that week, not a certification in disguise.
Farming & sourcing · 4 min read
Does brown vs. white eggshell color mean anything?
Shell color is determined entirely by the breed of hen, not by nutrition, farming practice, or egg quality. Breeds with white earlobes, like White Leghorns, lay white eggs. Breeds with red earlobes, like Rhode Island Reds, lay brown eggs. Some breeds even lay blue or green-tinted eggs.
Brown eggs are sometimes marketed at a premium and perceived as "more natural," but nutritionally and in terms of taste, shell color makes no meaningful difference. What actually affects flavor and nutrition is the hen's diet and living conditions — the shell color is just genetics.