Oct 25, 2020
How Do I Turn My Losses into Profits?
“I have an egg production business. Lots of eggs are broken every day at the time of collection. What should I do with the broken eggs? How do I use these broken eggs to start a new business and what business should I start?”
I’ve never met a business owner who doesn’t hate losing money. With all the time and effort you put into getting your final product, losing potential earnings at any stage can be annoying at best and ruinous at worst. Egg production is especially prone to these kinds of losses with it being normal to find cracks in up to 4% of eggs that are examined at the nest or cage.¹ For a large-scale operation this can mean thousands of lost eggs per day, and in an industry that already has razor-thin margins, you’re looking at minuscule profits if any at all. I admire your entrepreneurial spirit, but it’s possible that your question may be tackling the wrong part of the problem. Finding an alternate use for your cracked eggs would be great, but it’s much better to have no broken eggs at all. Business-wise, every indication points towards it being more profitable to solve this problem at the source rather than trying to live with the consequences. When life gives you broken eggs — maybe you shouldn’t try making lemonade.
Now, approaching your problem requires a good basic understanding of what exactly causes these kinds of cracks in your eggs. This is a production issue, simply put, and few are more knowledgeable about this area than the field of manufacturing.
Although feeding chickens and collecting eggs may appear overtly organic, the process itself shares many similarities with manufacturing. In the manufacturing process, the top five causes of quality alerts are said to be Improper Handling, Wrong Content, Improper Assembly, Defective Parts, and Misidentified Parts.² Of these five, the solution to your problem likely lies within the handling, assembly, or part management of your production process.
The improper handling and storage of materials can result in damage to the materials being moved, damage to the facility, and even employee injuries.³ For an egg production facility, this could be employees using the wrong equipment to collect eggs, using the wrong technique, or simply handling eggs too roughly. The larger your business gets, the more difficult it will be to identify and intercept this type of procedural malpractice, so adopting strict guidelines for your employees from early on will pay dividends far into the future.
Improper assembly traditionally refers to the incorrect manufacturing of a product by humans or machinery, but in the case of egg production, it could be reasonably understood to mean the assembly process within the hens themselves. It’s well known in the farming community that if you buy old hens from a commercial farm, they are already well past their prime for shell quality and strength.⁴ But as your business matures and scales, this issue will emerge at an increasing rate as your young hens eventually become older. The best way to avoid this problem is naturally to track the age of your hens, but making this process an integral part of your business operations will also provide data that is incredibly useful when you’re trying to determine the cause of your losses. After all, a cluster of cracked eggs could simply mean your birds are getting a little older.
The ingredients that go into the creation of the egg, specifically the food that your hens are eating should also be taken into consideration. Defective parts can look like a chipped screen on your brand new iPhone, but it may also look like thin eggshells due to malnutrition. Calcium deficiencies, vitamin D deficiencies, and excess phosphorous are all common reasons for weak, thin shells.⁴ Much like in manufacturing, if one part is not appropriate for production, it will negatively affect the whole. You can extend this principle even further in your business: if one part of your production process is unsuitable, it could affect the quality of your final product. In general, when examining your output, the first place you should be looking to is your inputs.
If you’ve considered all these factors and still come up blank, maybe it is time to start a broken eggshell business. That being said, if you ever end up with a flat tire, it may be better to find the hole and patch your tire before you consider reinventing the wheel.
Footnotes:
[1]Cracked Eggs and Your Small Flock of Laying Hens
[2] Top Five Causes of Manufacturing Quality Alerts and How to Avoid Them
