Trader Joe’s Shopper Buys Fertile Eggs and All of Them Hatched After 21 Days — New Fear Unlocked

The next time you take out the egg tray from your refrigerator to cook a delicious platter of omelette, scrambled eggs, or just the hard-boiled eggs, pay attention, because these eggs might be an unhatched offspring. One Californian woman, going by the moniker @thecaliforniahome on TikTok, showed how dozens of eggs she bought from Trader Joe’s ended up popping into little yellow chicks. “24 days ago, we bought these eggs,” said the woman who is also a content creator, mom, and wannabe farmer. The video displayed an aisle filled with Trader Joe’s fertile eggs. “Large white cage-free fertile eggs,” a handwritten sign attached to the shelf read. 

For the next 21 days, the woman placed these eggs inside an incubator.  “Almost all of them hatched,” she wrote in the video’s overlay caption while showing dozens of milky white eggs. The eggs were cracked, and out of these cracks, tiny yellow-brown chicks were bursting into life. “And now we have eight chicks,” she shared while the footage displayed a young boy playing with a brood of pastel yellow baby chicks that rustled like fluffy little balls murmuring on a mattress of green sunlit grass. “So this is love, so this is what makes life,” the lyrics played in the footage's background. “No egg shortage here,” the woman exclaimed before wrapping up the video.

What came as the greatest surprise to the viewers was the fact that Trader Joe’s sells fertilized eggs. Many of them pledged to never eat eggs again. “Huh! Why do they sell fertilized eggs? Is this real?” exclaimed @lisalxu. @edwin.elguerrerro grunted with a flurry of sobbing emojis, “Stop, I’m never going to eat eggs again!” @annacate commented, “Me checking to see if I accidentally bought fertile eggs from Trader Joe’s!” @kaylee said, “So never eating eggs again!”

It might sound bizarre, probably even brash, but yes, some of the eggs you see on the supermarket shelves are fertilized, which means they carry the possibility of hatching into baby chicks. But as Food & Wine explains, most of the grocery store eggs are not fertile.  Trader Joe's describes on their website that fertile eggs are the ones “laid by hens in contact with roosters.” But there are ways to tell if a hen’s egg is fertile or infertile. The clue lies in a tiny “bullseye” or white dot that appears on the yolk if the egg was fertilized by the rooster. “If the white dot has an additional white ring (making it a blastoderm) around it, then it is fertile,” Doctor Mary Fosnaught from NC State University shared with Food & Wine, and so did @home_chicken_keeping in an Instagram reel.

Fret not, it's safe to eat fertilized eggs, according to Lauren Cobey from the American Egg Board, per Greatist. Once the eggs are fetched for the retailers’ shelves, the refrigeration process suppresses the hatching, and hence, the chicks are never born. “When fertilized eggs are sold for consumption, there is no danger of eating a developing embryo,” explained Cobey. So while you don’t have the infamous goose that laid eggs of gold, you do have these fertile eggs that you can use to create your own poultry farm, unless, of course, you are craving a shakshuka or frittata. In that case, you can crack open those eggs because their rooster dad doesn't care anyway.

You can follow @thecaliforniahome on TikTok for more videos related to fertilized eggs.