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# Our food. Your questions. Does McDonald’s use real eggs?

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<!-- video src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/kPHpCcWt.m3u8" -->
## Video: Our food. Your questions. Does McDonald’s use real eggs?

[Watch (HLS stream): Our food. Your questions. Does McDonald’s use real eggs?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/kPHpCcWt.m3u8) (2:13)

![Our food. Your questions. Does McDonald’s use real eggs?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/kPHpCcWt/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2015-01-27. Our food. Your questions. Does McDonald’s use real eggs?_


---

Jul 25, 2023 4:20 PM UTC

---

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### Skeptic Of What’s In McDonald’s Food? Tweet Them

[Our food. Your questions. Is McDonald's beef real?](/video/LAZ5rnWZ/)

### Our food. Your questions. Is McDonald's beef real?

---


## Transcript

You've got questions, I've got questions too. That's why McDonald's has asked me to find the answers. Nicole Brady, mother of two, had an interesting question about McDonald's eggs. I have two kids and I care what they eat. I care about their heath. I'm actually a blogger, and I work in social media. And I've been part of the McDonald's Family Arches because it's a platform and a community where I'm allowed to voice my opinion. I just was curious about something and I asked the question. Are they real eggs? McDonald's followed up on it and here I am. So to get Nicole her answer, I'm gonna go directly to the source.

Welcome to Herbrucks poultry ranch. What specifically do you provide for McDonald's? So we do two different kinds of products for McDonald's. We do the fresh shell eggs that are used in the Egg McMuffin. And we also do liquid eggs which become something else on the breakfast menu. The eggs that we're looking at here are very fresh. These eggs were laid either yesterday or today. So the eggs don't sit around at all in this process. Literally 100 feet from here would be the first chicken house. Many of these eggs are so fresh that if you picked them up, they'd still be warm. [ LAUGH ] Okay. So what are we looking at here?

The first thing that happens when the eggs come from the chicken house is they get washed. Okay. And that consists of warm soapy water basically. And after that they get rinsed off, get dried off, and every egg has to be looked at to make sure that it's clean, that it can move on to the next step in the process. Once we determine that it's made that criteria, the eggs get weighed. And. 'Kay. That determines if it's a large egg and it's in the category for an Egg McMuffin. Speaker: Or if it's gonna be too big or too small, and it would be used for the liquid egg. Speaker: They're still perfectly good eggs.

Speaker: They're still perfectly good eggs. They just don't make the criteria, size wise. After they get weighed, the last thing we do is we send some light through the egg to look for imperfections inside of the egg. Speaker: Now, what happens to the eggs that you find have defects in them? Speaker: Anything that's found to have a defect in it is discarded from the machine, at that point in the process. Okay. All the eggs that we see on these conveyors here are destined for the breaking room. They'll leave the plant as liquid eggs. [ LAUGH ] It's so cool and so

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