There’s a lot to worry about eggs these days. Will prices, which reached an all-time high in February, continue to drop? Will restaurant chains like Denny’s and Waffle House reverse their egg surcharges on menu items? And will thrifty celebrants resort to dyeing and hiding potatoes this Easter?
But here’s one thing we don’t have to worry about as much as our forbearers did: a dozen white jumbos breaking on the way home from the grocery store.
So ubiquitous are egg cartons that they don’t come in for much glory. And yet they are a marvel of form and function, keeping products as delicate as porcelain teacups safe on long hauls and short Trader Joe’s runs, with no tissue or bubble wrap, only ingeniously designed cardboard or plastic.
“As food packaging has become more sophisticated—from aseptic linings in cartons of milk to vacuum-packed fish—the humble egg carton has changed little,” noted the BBC. “Shock absorbing and cheap to produce, the carton has also become a signifier for what it contains—you don’t need to see the eggs to know what it contains.”
But before the cartons became commonplace, figuring out how to ship eggs without breaking many of them was an obsession for farmers and grocers. And it was a challenge for inventors who, iteratively and incrementally, arrived at the carton design that’s so familiar today.
Crack is wack: The man often credited for designing its earliest iteration of today’s egg carton was a Canadian, Joseph Coyle.
Coyle was publishing a newspaper in Aldemere, British Columbia, in 1911, when, as the apocryphal-sounding yet oft-told story goes, a dispute arose between a hotel owner and the farmer who supplied his eggs repeatedly delivering them with some broken.
Hoping to restore peace, the newspaperman came up with a design where a dozen eggs fit into V-shaped folded cardboard slots that ensured they wouldn’t bump against each other.
“I have devised a simple, practical, and inexpensive box for carrying eggs,” wrote Coyle of this novel “egg box” contraption in his application for a Canadian patent, which was granted in 1918. Coyle received a US patent for the design the same year, and proceeded to produce and license the design through various partnerships and licensing deals in both countries.
To protect and serve: Today’s egg cartons look less like Coyle’s origami-ish design because they are made from molds immersed in a wood-pulp slurry.
Many inventors built on Coyle’s approach using a moldable form of cardboard instead. One, Francis H. Sherman, secured patents for several egg-carton designs beginning in 1926 using a folded cardboard design, and in 1934 received a patent for a design using “a pulp-sucking or fibre-felting process” with “the fibres being deposited on molds or forms of the appropriate shape.”
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The first carton made of polystyrene foam (commonly referred to as Styrofoam, a brand name) was patented by Dow Chemical in 1967. Strictly on the design front, it claimed to be the first to design the now-familiar latch system, where a nub in the base fits into an opening on the hinged lid cover.
As for the material, the patent is unequivocal in its assertion that the polystyrene is better at protecting eggs over cardboard or molded paper pulp.
“Prior to the present invention,” the patent application asserted, “there was no carton providing completely satisfactory cushioning of eggs contained in its cells such that the eggs, even under excessive conditions of load or impact, would remain unbroken.”
File that under “chutzpah” for Dow, because there is not a consensus that foam cartons are superior.
Out of the frying pan… An amusing test, if not quite up to Consumer Reports’ testing protocols, came from WAMU, the NPR affiliate in Washington, DC, in 2019.
They dropped cartons of eggs from thigh height (again, not scientists), pitting the traditional molded paper pulp variety against polystyrene foam and clear plastic trifold versions. The winner with the least broken eggs was cardboard, followed by clear plastic and, last, polystyrene foam.
Applying more scientific rigor, the Journal of Food Science and Technology reached the same conclusion, that cardboard boxes were tops for preventing breakage, though they noted they weren’t so great when wet—even if its prose was a bit dry.
“The disadvantage of cardboard boxes is that they are not as resistant to the impact of moisture as polystyrene boxes and in the case of an increase in box moisture due to storage in inappropriate conditions, their mechanical resistance decreases,” the study concluded.=
More elegiac was Canada’s National Post, which published an ode to the traditional molded paper egg carton in 2018.
The “biodegradable vessel is a masterpiece of streamlined efficiency,” it argued, “embracing a dozen fragile lily-white eggs in its 12 snug cradles and whisking them, miraculously intact, from farm to grocer to your refrigerator at home, as unblemished as the moment they were laid.”
Leave it to an egg carton to go over easy.