You can sell pickled eggs, but not the way they're often made at home. An egg is a low-acid food, so pickled eggs sold at room temperature are an acidified food under FDA's rules: the maker registers with FDA, files a scheduled process worked out by a process authority, and works under someone who has completed an approved course. The other route is to keep them refrigerated from the kitchen to the customer, which takes them outside the acidified food rules but not outside food safety. The reason it's taken seriously is botulism: a whole egg is slow to acidify to the center, and a home-pickled egg kept at room temperature caused a case of botulism in Illinois. Below is the risk, the two routes, what a jar costs, and a free price calculator.
The short version
- Pickled eggs at room temperature are an acidified food: register, file a scheduled process, train.
- Refrigerated pickled eggs, kept cold throughout, are excluded from the acidified food rules.
- Either way, they're made in a licensed kitchen; home kitchens are generally out.
- The yolk is the hard part: acid takes time to reach the center of a whole egg.
- A process authority sets the recipe, the pH, the time and the hold before sale.
- Label refrigerated eggs "keep refrigerated" and give them a use-by date.
- TaroStack keeps every batch with its egg lots, its pH and its date. More below.
The risk
In November 1997, a man in Illinois got botulism from pickled eggs he'd made a week earlier: hard-boiled eggs, peeled and pricked, packed with beets, peppers and vinegar in a jar with a metal lid and kept at room temperature. The toxin in the egg yolks was 1,000 times the concentration in the pickling liquid (CDC). That's the lesson for anyone selling them: the brine can be acidic while the center of the egg isn't yet, and a sealed jar at room temperature is where botulism grows.
Route one: refrigerated
FDA's acidified food rules exclude foods that are stored, distributed and retailed under refrigeration (21 CFR 114.3). Pickled eggs made in a licensed kitchen, kept cold the whole time, labeled "keep refrigerated," with a use-by date, are the simpler route for a small maker: sold from a cooler at a market, in a deli case, or to bars that keep them in the fridge. The health department still licenses the kitchen and may ask about the process, and the cold chain has to hold, from the kitchen through delivery to the shelf.
Route two: shelf-stable
Pickled eggs sold at room temperature are an acidified food: a low-acid food with acid added, with a finished pH of 4.6 or below (21 CFR 114.3). A commercial processor of acidified foods registers with FDA within 10 days of starting and files a scheduled process for each product (21 CFR 108.25), and production runs under someone who has completed a school approved by FDA's Commissioner covering acidification and pH control (21 CFR 114.10). The scheduled process comes from a process authority, who sets the brine, the egg size, the pH target in the yolk, and how long the eggs are held before they can be sold. How a process authority letter works is in process authority letter, and home kitchens under cottage food laws are generally limited to foods that don't need any of this; how those laws work is in how to start a cottage food business. This is general information, not legal or food safety advice.
What a jar costs
Schuylkill Pantry, a made-up small food maker in Reading, Pennsylvania, I use in these examples, sells red beet eggs, refrigerated, by the quart and the pint:
| A jar | Quart, 12 eggs | Pint, 6 eggs |
|---|---|---|
| Eggs at $3 a dozen, plus 5% cracked or badly peeled | $3.15 | $1.58 |
| Brine: vinegar, sugar, spices, beet juice | $0.80 | $0.45 |
| Jar and lid | $1.20 | $0.90 |
| Label | $0.15 | $0.15 |
| Boiling, peeling, packing, at $20 an hour | 12 min, $4.00 | 7 min, $2.33 |
| Cost | $9.30 | $5.41 |
| Price, 45% margin after 3% card fees | $18.00 | $10.50 |
Peeling is the slow part, and the eggs that won't peel cleanly are the loss. A bar or deli buying by the gallon jar needs a wholesale price; how to set one is in how to price baked goods for wholesale, where the same arithmetic applies.
Get the calculator
Download the pickled egg pricing calculator. Type the eggs in the jar, what eggs cost a dozen, your allowance for losses, the brine, jar, lid and label, the minutes a jar takes, your hourly rate, card fees and the margin you want. It works out the cost of a jar, its price rounded up to 50 cents, and what's left. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.
Where this stops working
Eggs bought by the case from two farms, batches with their pH readings, jars dated in a walk-in, a market cooler, three bars and a deli. A sheet can't say which farm's eggs went into a batch, which bars got jars from it, or which jars are close to their date.
How TaroStack does it
TaroStack keeps every batch with its egg lots, its pH and its date.
Batches with their lots. Each product is a recipe of eggs, brine and jar, and units convert: eggs bought by the 15-dozen case, used by the egg. Recording a batch takes them off stock from the lots used, notes the lots automatically, and puts the jars into a lot with their use-by date.
Batch records with the pH. Batch record forms carry your own fields, such as brine pH, yolk pH and hold time, with limits and sign-off, so the scheduled process is followed and recorded batch by batch.
And the customers. Jars close to their date show in your alerts, picking takes the oldest first, and one report walks a lot of eggs to every customer who got jars from it.
| The job | Notebook | In TaroStack |
|---|---|---|
| Which farm's eggs went into batch 12? | Maybe in the notebook | The batch's lots |
| pH and hold time, signed | A clipboard | Batch record fields, with limits |
| Jars close to their date | Read the lids | Alerts by date |
| Which bars got that batch? | Read the invoices | One report, lot to customer |
Recipes, batches, lots, recalls and batch record forms are on every plan, from $49 a month. The first 30 days are free, with no credit card. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.