Bird Eggs: Can You Hatch Chicks from Supermarket Eggs?

All birds come from and lay eggs. These include chickens, which are still considered birds as they belong to taxonomic class Aves. Poultries often have hundreds, if not thousands, of eggs each day hatched.

We can also see tons of eggs naturally on bird nests protected by their mothers. But one of the most familiar places where we see bird eggs is none other than our favorite grocery stores or supermarkets.

With this in mind, the question comes if a chick can hatch from a supermarket egg, also called a raw egg or a grocery egg. There are ongoing debates regarding if the subject matter is a possibility.

Some people are using fiction as evidence, where a character opens raw eggs bought from the grocery store only to find live chicks inside them.

There were also several recent videos online also show people buying eggs from their local stores and apparently hatching them later with a live chick.

Can You Hatch Supermarket Eggs?

The answer to the question is unlikely since most commercial egg farms strictly operate under all-female flocks because male chickens are not needed for egg production.

This means that the bird eggs we see in commercial stories need to be fertilized first before a chick hatch from it. Without the male rooster, the eggs will never be fertilized and will be unable to develop into a chicken embryo.

According to Michigan State University (MSU), it is generally not possible to hatch a chick from a raw egg bought from a grocery store, citing that the aspect of chicken embryology shows that for a chicken to develop from an egg, it must be fertilized first, as mentioned before.

In this context, most eggs being sold commercially in grocery stores, supermarkets, and other retailers come from poultry farms and have not been fertilized.

Experts in the field say that laying hens at most commercial farms have never seen their male counterparts but will still lay eggs even without them. Under the principle of reproductive biology, an egg can only become fertilized if a hen and a rooster mate before the formation and laying of the egg.

Egg Production

In addition to natural egg production, which involves the mating of both male and female birds, eggs can be produced in different ways.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), poultry enterprises engage in the following methods for egg production:

• Backyard poultry production
• Farm flock production
• Commercial poultry production
• Specialized egg production
• Integrated egg production

In relation to supermarket eggs, it can only be possible to hatch them if a product ends up being a fertilized egg. However, it's hard to know if they ever do, especially for eggs that have been mass produced for bigger grocery chains.

Birds in the wild are known to move freely and hatch their own eggs without any restrictions or intervention from humans. But since grocery eggs are from poultries where owners typically only use the chickens for hatching unfertilized egg for consumption, it is incredibly rare to find fertilized eggs from a supermarket.