![\"Jesse](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/06\/200624_Jessse_LaFlamme_5969.jpg\")
<\/a>From the deviled to the Dutch baby, eggs have been having such a moment that grocers around the country limited purchases of this most basic of foods starting in late March. Price spikes soon followed, along with empty shelves that indicated that eggs had become the refrigerated version of toilet paper: hoard-worthy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pete and Gerry\u2019s Organic Eggs \u2014 laid by free-range hens raised without antibiotics or pesticides \u2014 were a hot commodity. So too was the other brand Laflamme founded in 2002, Nellie’s, free-range eggs certified humane by the nonprofit Humane Farm Animal Care organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are selling every single egg we produce,\u201d Laflamme says from his home in Hanover, N.H., during a rare quiet moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Early on in the pandemic, the company entirely revamped its safety practices, and coped with two small COVID-19 outbreaks in its packing facilities. But practically overnight, Laflamme said, orders for Pete and Gerry\u2019s eggs increased in volume by between 30 and 50 percent. \u201cIt is really significant,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Orders quickly exceeded supply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>As he put it, Hannaford, a Maine-based supermarket with stores throughout New England and New York, might be asking for a trailer and a half of those Pete and Gerry\u2019s eggs, but the company would only have one trailer\u2019s worth to send their way. No matter how much homebound humans are craving eggs, farmers can’t make hens lay any faster than usual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Initially, the increased demand could have been chalked up to an annual egg-centric event: the impending Easter holiday, which fell on April 12. But that Sunday came and went, and eggs were still flying off the shelves. Not only were hordes of Americans becoming bread-making experts, they were also apparently baking cakes, cookies and other family-friendly recipes that called for eggs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The New York Times<\/em> cooking site started making recipes available for free to nonsubscribers, including egg-oriented ones like Eli Zabar\u2019s egg salad sandwich<\/a>, in categories such as \u201c30 Recipes for Lunch at Home,\u201d perfect for workers suddenly ensconced in home offices and missing the local deli. (The secret to Zabar\u2019s egg salad? Toss half the whites for double the yolkiness.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the food and cookware website Food52, the late-May obsession was a recipe from a Charlotte, N.C., restaurant for the apparently addictive Kindred Milk Bread, served warm and colored a warm yellow by no fewer than three large eggs. (And Pete and Gerry\u2019s own website offers even more recipe ideas<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n No wonder people need more eggs. But Laflamme is still a little stunned by the demand. As organic producers, Pete and Gerry\u2019s is very \u201cniche,\u201d he says. So too is Nellie’s, with its free-range eggs raised on small family farms. \u201cWe are really an outlier.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe are selling every single egg we produce.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n He considers his company an outlier because, while the market for organic eggs is growing, organic flocks still represent a small percentage of the vast numbers of laying hens in the United States. In May there were 390 million laying hens nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Only 15.7 million, or about 4 percent, were certified organic. That number fluctuates, but Laflamme said it’s usually between 5 and 6 percent. In its weekly reports on the egg market, USDA\u2019s Agricultural Marketing Service doesn\u2019t even list organics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And even within that small sliver of the market, there is abuse of the organic label, says a watchdog group, the Cornucopia Institute, which estimates that roughly 80 percent of the eggs that are labeled organic in the U.S. might be the product of organic-fed, antibiotic-free hens, but they\u2019re still being raised in factory settings and never see the light of day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In Cornucopia’s rating of organic eggs from 1 to 5, Pete and Gerry\u2019s recently received a 4-egg, or \u201cexcellent\u201d ranking, whereas national brands like Trader Joe and Horizon Organic eggs scored only one egg in the same period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking over as chief financial officer right after Bates, Laflamme, now owner and CEO, has led the company to annual growth rates of 20 to 30 percent every year in the last decade. (The company name comes from Laflamme\u2019s father Gerry, who took over his father-in-law\u2019s farm in Monroe, N.H. in the late 1970s, and Gerry\u2019s cousin Pete, who handled distribution. The family converted their operation to organic in the late 1990s.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n These days Pete and Gerry\u2019s buys eggs from 65 small family farms throughout the Northeast, including in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Pennsylvania. To supply its Nellie’s brand of free-range eggs \u2014 named after Laflamme’s pet hen from childhood \u2014 the company works with another 60 small family farms, including in the Midwest. With a second packing plant in Pennsylvania, the firm employs about 200 people, all told, on the packing and shipping side. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n If Pete and Gerry\u2019s and Nellie’s were well-positioned for the egg boom, the industry as a whole had a harder time responding to it. As with flour, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and other commodities, the problem wasn\u2019t so much short supplies as disruptions to the supply chain. As Laflamme points out, there are actually too many, egg-laying hens in the country, a result of an over-correction to a shortage created by the 2014\u201315 avian flu outbreak in 21 states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s the destinations for those eggs that presented a problem as the pandemic began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One-third of all egg production in the U.S. goes in liquid form (described by USDA as \u201cbroken\u201d) to the food service and large-scale restaurant markets. Another 7%, so-called \u201cloose\u201d eggs, goes to the same outlets in bulk cartons, the kind that are open at the top and too floppy to simply be redirected to grocery stores. With most commercial food service shut down from March into May or later, the loose eggs had nowhere to go. Prices dropped to something like 39 cents a dozen, Laflamme says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In theory those extremely cheap, still entirely edible eggs, might have been redirected to grocery stores. But egg producers were stymied, Laflamme says, \u201cby the inflexibility in our supply chain. They can\u2019t get their hands on cartons.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be clear, Laflamme doesn\u2019t mean cartons full of eggs \u2014 he means cartons for<\/em> eggs. \u201cThere are only four or five companies in the whole country that make those paper cartons,\u201d Laflamme says, and they couldn\u2019t adapt fast enough. Here\u2019s another area where the Pete and Gerry\u2019s approach paid off. \u201cOur cartons are made from recycled soda bottles. They are a premium product and we largely haven\u2019t been disrupted that way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a>