News

Oct 16, 2024

Omelettes, sauce and minks: What happens to BC's millions of extra eggs?

Tyler Olsen October 16, 2024 Not all eggs end up in cartons bound for the grocery store. 📷 Light Field Studios/Shutterstock This story first appeared in the October 16, 2024, edition of the Fraser

Tyler Olsen October 16, 2024

Not all eggs end up in cartons bound for the grocery store. 📷 Light Field Studios/Shutterstock

This story first appeared in the October 16, 2024, edition of the Fraser Valley Current newsletter. Subscribe for free to get Fraser Valley news in your email every weekday morning.

The Fraser Valley’s egg farmers are planning to build a massive new facility to turn broken and surplus eggs into useful ingredients for people, and sometimes pets.

Egg Solutions - Vanderpols, a company partially owned by a farmers’ co-operative, has plans to build a 65,000-square-foot plant near Abbotsford International Airport.

The new building is part of the company’s plan to move its operations out of a dairy processing facility where it currently operates—and to give the company space to expand while solving other challenges. Among those challenges is the pending elimination of mink farms, which have traditionally served as the end of the line for the thousands of litres of egg waste each day.

The proposal to construct the new facility pulls back the curtain on what happens to the millions of eggs that never make it into a carton.

Not every egg that comes out of a chicken ends up in a carton. Some eggs crack, others are too small or otherwise unsellable as consumer eggs. But those eggs are far from useless.

Eggs aren’t just eaten over-easy, poached, boiled, or scrambled. They’re also a critical ingredient in a huge number of products and recipes, and a pasteurized egg in a container can be just as useful as one that comes in its existing shell.

Nearly 60 years ago, a Surrey egg-grading facility stopped throwing away surplus eggs and started to process and pasteurize the eggs’ liquid into usable products. And in the years since, that company—Vanderpol’s Eggs—has moved to Abbotsford and evolved into not one, but two of the valley’s largest and most important food businesses.

At its new Mt. Lehman Road location in Abbotsford, Vanderpol’s Eggs sprouted a massive new second business—Vitalus Nutrition that used some of the same technology used to concentrate egg whites to turn whey—a milky byproduct of the cheese-making process—into protein concentrates that could be sold across the world.

Vitalus has since become BC’s largest milk processor, and is now building a massive $300 million new plant next to the existing Mt. Lehman plant that will also allow for the production of butter. Meanwhile, its egg-processing business has continued to thrive and evolve selling its egg ingredients to bakeries, bulk food manufacturers, hotels, and even cruise ship operators.

In 2017, the company became Egg Solutions - Vanderpols (ESV) after a co-operative made up of 70 BC egg farmers bought a portion of the company. Today, the facility is the only one of its kind west of Manitoba. (ESV also operates a facility there). The Abbotsford plant processes more than 4.5 million eggs each week; ingredients like those produced by the company comprise nearly one-third of the entire egg market, according to Mike Vanderpol, the company’s president.

All that growth is one of several factors leading to the company’s plan to build a new facility.

Increased production at both Vitalus and ESV has increased concerns about the potential for allergen cross-contamination, according to an application submitted to the City of Abbotsford.

Vitalus “sells some of their milk products as an ingredient for infant formulas and cannot expand

the market by having egg allergen in the same building,” the company writes.

Building a new egg-processing facility would also create room necessary to grow ESV in several ways. The company says a larger facility would allow for more research and development of new products. ESV doesn’t just sell pasteurized egg whites for others to cook into new dishes. It already produces the foundations of a range of egg-based meals for use by the hospitality industry. Blueprints for the new factory show the new plant includes a room specifically designated for pre-made products, sauces and tamago, a Japanese omelette.

Blueprints for ESV’s new egg-processing facility show how surplus eggs get turned into an array of new products. 📷 City of Abbotsford/ESV

A larger plant would also allow for increased use of its microbiology lab. The company’s existing lab is used to test egg products before they are sent to customers. But the local blueberry industry also uses it to test both their berries and the water used to grow them. More space would allow for the lab to serve more farmers, ESV says.

Then there are the minks. Or, more accurately, a lack thereof.

Although ESV is built to process surplus eggs, it still generates around 2,000 litres of egg waste each day, according to the application. Historically, that waste has been sent to the Fraser Valley’s mink farms, whose furry animals eat the egg remnants. But farmed minks are susceptible to coronaviruses like COVID, and the recent pandemic prompted worry that the industry could help supercharge the transmission of the virus. Those concerns (coupled with the relatively low support for an industry focused on the production of fur products) led the province to move to phase out mink farming.

For the egg processor, the mink phase-out means that it has been paying to throw away its egg waste since 2020. A new facility would allow it to install a new “spray dryer” that it would turn the byproduct into a dried powder that could be included in pet food or animal feed.

To build the new plant in its chosen location on farmland just east of Abbotsford International Airport, ESV needed the sign-off of the Agricultural Land Commission. It automatically cleared that hurdle in January after ALC CEO Kim Grout confirmed that more than half the products processed will come from the farmers’ co-operative.

Abbotsford council gave its approval at a meeting in late September. That approval should pave the way for construction and a new era for BC’s surplus eggs.

How does a surplus egg production line work? You can see how eggs would move through the new plant in this blueprint.

This story first appeared in the October 16, 2024, edition of the Fraser Valley Current newsletter. Subscribe for free to get Fraser Valley news in your email every weekday morning.