‘Egg King’ Machine Gets a Break from Congress

A Tustin-based company whose only product is a machine that can break as many eggs in a minute as a person can in an hour got a new lease on life Monday. The reprieve came when the U.S. House of Representatives killed an amendment to the 1985 farm bill that was designed to block use of the Egg King device.

The Egg King, a 3-foot-high, canister-shaped machine built by MISA Manufacturing Inc., uses centrifugal force to break eggs and separate their contents from the shells at a rate of about 360 eggs every 30 seconds.

Since its invention four years ago, 700 hospitals, restaurants and bakeries nationwide have bought the machine, settling the dilemma between breaking fresh eggs one at a time or buying the liquid, frozen or powdered product marketed by the egg industry.

Not everybody likes the machine, however.

After some prodding by the United Egg Producers, the House Agriculture Committee in July added an amendment to the farm bill that would have prohibited egg processing in a manner that mixed shells with the whites and yolks or that “does not allow examination of the content of individual eggs being processed.”

Officials of the 900-member industry group argue that the Egg King could contaminate food and might lead to the outbreak of diseases such as salmonella, because the device crushes the eggs whole before removing the shells from the liquid.

“It always poses a health hazard whenever you mix the shell with the meat of the egg itself,” said Al Pope, United Egg Producers’ president. “Feathers, manure and all that stuff from the farm mixes with the liquid egg.”

Karen Darling, the Agriculture department’s assistant secretary for marketing and inspection services, agrees the machine could pose a health hazard. Even if the eggs have been washed before being fed into the machine, she said, the shells still can harbor salmonella bacteria.

Moreover, Darling said, the method makes its difficult to detect a rotten egg, posing the danger that bad eggs will be mixed with good ones. “Our concern,” she said, “is not really with the machine but with the product it generates.”

But Mike Maynard, Egg King’s inventor and MISA’s president, counters that “if the machine is used properly, there is no problem.”

A warning label on the device cautions that only eggs graded B or higher can be used and that the eggs must be washed in accordance with USDA standards to minimize risk of contamination.

Maynard said efforts to limit Egg King use are anti-competitive and are spearheaded by processors of low-quality eggs--eggs that most often are used in powdered and frozen egg products.

“The egg producers have been slanderous. They’ve been going around to the customers and telling them that the machine is going to be outlawed and that it’s unsafe,” he said. He blamed the egg producers’ campaign for a drop in production of Egg Kings to 10 or less units a month from an average of 60 units a month last year.

The egg producers may take a second crack at the Egg King when the farm bill hits the Senate, possibly later this month. But Maynard instead is hoping that sales levels recover.

“I think the way it turned out today, we ought to be back on our projections within about 60 days. Now it’s strictly upward and onward,” he said. “We had a lot of customers who were waiting for the clouds to clear.”