How Old Are The Eggs You Buy At The Grocery Store?

Eggs are an indispensable part of any well-stocked home refrigerator, whether you are serving them up over-easy for breakfast or dropping a few into your cake or bread batters. It goes without saying that sourcing eggs from a local farm or neighbor with a coop will yield the freshest specimens, but what if you lack access to home layers and still want to find the newest eggs? That means learning a little bit about how supermarket eggs are dated and what industry regulations exist regarding egg freshness.

First of all, you should know that the eggs in the dairy case at the store could be up to two months old. Farmers have up to a month after eggs are laid by chickens to put them in cartons, and eggs may be sold for up to a month after they are packaged. Sixty days may seem long in the proverbial tooth for eggs, but these are still just fine to eat. In fact, if you enjoy hard-boiled eggs, you may find that older eggs peel more easily, eliminating the need for complicated hacks. Still concerned about finding the newest eggs at the store? Then you will have to do a little bit of investigating.

Just like those colored tags on bread bags that tell you the date the loaves were baked, egg cartons carry a major clue regarding freshness, hidden right in plain sight. It's a printed number that tells you precisely what day of the year your eggs were put in their carton, ranging from 1 – 365, with each integer representing a respective day of the calendar year. In other words, the number 1 stands for January 1st, while 365 means December 31st. If you are faced with a large backstock of multiple brands of eggs at the grocer, you can sift through the date codes to find the eggs that were packaged most recently, assuming that's important to you.

Does the freshness of eggs actually matter? The answer is yes ... but only to a point. Cooking with expired eggs is obviously bad, as you run the risk of incurring a nasty case of food poisoning. Additionally, using old eggs means potentially compromising on flavor and consistency, which is one of the cooking mistakes you're making when scrambling eggs. Fresher eggs also have a more aesthetically-pleasing, deeper yellow-colored yolk. With all that said, only a few specific recipes (like souffle, which depends on the consistency of the white) will be significantly impacted by fresher versus older eggs, and the difference in flavor generally isn't pronounced enough to compromise enjoyment. So mind your expiration dates, but, otherwise, eat up those eggs from the grocery store.