Sauder Amish Country Eggs: Connecting farmers and consumers with healthy, fresh eggs

  • by Jennifer Kneuss
  • December 21, 2010
  • 456
                        
High quality protein, thirteen essential nutritional elements, only 5 grams of fat, crucial antioxidants, and a mere 80 calories – all for around fifteen cents per serving. That is, as the saying goes, ‘the incredible, edible egg’. And for four generations, the Sauder family has been providing the very best of this incredible, natural product through Sauder Amish Country Eggs. “My great-grandfather started the business by selling eggs door to door in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, back in the 1930s. Then my grandfather started the wholesale side of the business around 1946, where he began buying an additional supply from local farmers and began distributing them,” said Mark Sauder, who, along with his father Paul, now operate the company. In 1992, Sauder opened their Winesburg, Ohio facility. “We are the marketer of local farm eggs to major distributors. That is the model we have stayed with since my grandfather,” noted Sauder. “We felt that we could deliver better quality and service to our customers by providing a market for the local family farm. That is something we continue to focus on today.” Sauder Amish Country Eggs purchases all of their eggs from these local family farms, distributing them in the same market area where they are produced. Consumers can look at each Sauder egg, and find the ‘best used by’ date stamped on it with a food-based dye, along with a very unique code. “We also are giving that farmer visibility, by putting a farm code directly on the egg, and allowing the consumer to go on to our website at www.saudereggs.com and see the farm that their eggs, be they regular, organic, or cage-free, came from. They can see the people who are growing their food for them, and learn about that farm,” explained Sauder. “We feel that the farmer is there 24/7. That is how he feeds his family, by taking care of those chickens. He is going to do a better job of that than someone who punches the clock and goes home at 5 o’clock.” “Here in Ohio, we have about 30 producers we work with,” explained plant manager Wayne Troyer. “I have a relationship with each of our producers.” Sauder follows extremely stringent quality control methods to insure that eggs are pure and healthy. In fact, the Sauder standards are much higher that the FDA requires. Said Sauder, “We want to put out a safe product for the consumer. It is the right thing to do.” They also take steps so that their customers obtain the freshest eggs on the market. “We pick up eggs from our producers several times a week. What we process here today will be loaded up today and in the stores tomorrow,” emphasized Troyer. “We deliver directly to our stores, rather than taking trailer loads to a warehouse, so we can control our quality and freshness much better.” “We are trying to reconnect our consumers with the farmers, to show them where their food is coming from. That is something that the American people want to be able to see, and something that we believe very firmly in,” stated Mark Sauder. “That is the right way to raise food for the American public.”


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