Many egg farms, one brand and a feed of its own.

Eggland’s Best is an American brand of shell eggs and egg products. It is managed today by Eggland’s Best, LLC, which gives its address on its own website as Malvern, Pennsylvania; The Shelby Report, a grocery trade paper, also described the business as Malvern-based in December 2021. The name on the carton does not belong to a single farm. On its About Us page, the company describes a network of USDA-inspected local farms across the United States that produce eggs under its name, and it says each of those eggs carries an “EB” stamp printed on the shell.

The company dates its own story to 1992. Its About Us page opens with the line that “in 1992, we set out to create a better egg,” and it frames that moment as a time when, in its account, egg consumption was in decline, shoppers were concerned about cholesterol and fresh eggs of good quality were hard to come by. The company says its response began with the hen rather than the carton. It describes a feed of its own formulation, which it calls patented and all-vegetarian, and says that all of the hens laying Eggland’s Best eggs receive it.

The company also describes how it checks that feed. It says every Eggland’s Best producer sends samples of its hen feed each month to be evaluated in the company’s laboratory, and that it retains an independent auditing firm to collect Eggland’s Best eggs from supermarket shelves around the country and send them to outside laboratories. Those are the company’s own descriptions of its practice, and this guide repeats them as such.

Behind the farms sits a cooperative. A press release issued by Cal-Maine Foods on 1 May 2012 described Eggland’s Best, Inc. as a New Jersey-based egg cooperative, and said that Cal-Maine was one of its shareholders and a franchisee, with exclusive licence agreements to market and distribute Eggland’s Best eggs in a number of major metropolitan markets, New York City among them. English Wikipedia’s article on Cal-Maine, the Mississippi egg producer, lists Eggland’s Best among the brand names under which Cal-Maine’s eggs are sold, alongside the Land O’Lakes name.

A cooperative, a joint venture with Land O’Lakes and a handover at the top.

The structure that runs the brand today was set up in 2012. On 1 May 2012, Land O’Lakes, the Minnesota farmer-owned cooperative, and Eggland’s Best, Inc. announced a new branded specialty egg joint venture, with datelines in Arden Hills, Minnesota, and Jeffersonville, Pennsylvania. Their joint release said each organisation would hold an equal stake. The same release described Eggland’s Best, Inc. as a cooperative that manages the advertising and marketing of Eggland’s Best eggs, and described Land O’Lakes as already present in the egg category as the national licensor of Land O Lakes brand eggs.

Cal-Maine’s release of the same day set out the mechanics. Eggland’s Best, Inc. contributed certain assets, including its trademarks, into a new limited liability company, Eggland’s Best, LLC, in which Land O’Lakes bought a membership interest, with Eggland’s Best, Inc. and its subsidiaries holding the rest. According to that release, the transaction took effect on 30 April 2012, and the new company would license both the Eggland’s Best and the Land O’Lakes egg brands. The Poultry Site reported the same terms on 3 May 2012.

The leadership has changed hands once since then, in a planned handover. The Land O’Lakes release named Charles T. Lanktree, then president and chief executive of Eggland’s Best, Inc., as president and chief executive of the new LLC. In December 2021, The Shelby Report reported that Lanktree, known as Charlie, had announced plans to retire, and that Kurt Misialek would add the title of chief executive to his role as president, effective 1 January 2022. The paper reported that Misialek had joined the company in 1990, became chief operating officer in 2015 and president in 2019, and described the change as the last step of a transition plan put in place several years earlier.

Design and documentation.

Eggs and fluid milk are among the plainest things in a grocery basket, and that plainness shapes how their packaging works. An egg carton has to protect a fragile product, stack in a chilled case and still tell a shopper at a glance what kind of eggs sit inside, so its lid, its colour and the words printed on it do most of the brand’s work. A milk jug or carton has a similar job: it has to be recognised quickly on a crowded shelf, often by a cap colour or a band of type, before anyone reads the small print.

Because the products inside can look alike from one name to the next, the brands in this group lean on labels, logos, carton shapes and advertising to set themselves apart. Some of the names belong to farmer-owned cooperatives, some to family companies and some to much larger food groups, and the name on the front does not always say which.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its eggs or milk are packed and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A stamp on every egg, a carton on many farms and two brands under one roof.

The most distinctive part of the Eggland’s Best identity is not on the carton at all. The company says on its About Us page that a classic, organic or cage-free egg “with the EB stamp on the shell” is one of its eggs, and The Shelby Report, in its December 2021 article, also referred to the distinctive “EB” stamp on the shell. The company also uses “EB” as shorthand for the brand on its website, where shoppers are invited to find their “EB egg.”

The carton then carries the rest of the brand. The company’s website groups its range into a small set of families, among them classic eggs, cage-free eggs, organic eggs and pasture-raised and free-range eggs, and it also lists hard-cooked peeled eggs, egg whites and prepared egg dishes. Each of those sits under the same name and the same stamp, so the identity has to stretch across shell eggs sold by the dozen and packaged foods sold in the chilled case. The website also carries recipes, how-to videos and a reader feature called “Ask Eggie.”

The 2012 joint venture adds a second layer. Because Eggland’s Best, LLC licenses both the Eggland’s Best and the Land O’Lakes egg brands, according to the 2012 releases, the same company licenses the Land O’Lakes egg name, which comes from a Minnesota dairy cooperative, and its own stamped Eggland’s Best name. Cal-Maine’s release described its own role in the system as a shareholder, franchisee and licensee.

For a design guide, Eggland’s Best shows how a brand made by many farms can rely on a small, repeated mark printed on the product itself. Compare the Land O’Lakes Brand Guidelines, whose egg licence sits in the same joint venture, and the Pete and Gerry’s Brand Guidelines, a New Hampshire family farm brand in the same aisle. For this guide we use seal red, carton blue and shell cream with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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