Hilary Brooks never thought she’d be in the business of selling duck eggs. When starting Fork Creek Farm in North Carolina, she planned on selling duck meat, and maybe eating a few of the eggs herself.
But when the owner of a natural foods store placed an order for duck eggs, she quickly sold out. Business has been up ever since.
“Each month I was doubling my sales, and they were running out,†Brooks says. “I had to stop telling people about it, because I didn’t have anything to sell them.†She even had a distributor for Asian grocery stores offer to buy more than 1,000 duck eggs per week — far more than the 150 to 175 per week her 25 layers could handle.
When it comes to eggs, chickens have a near monopoly on the American market, so much so that the USDA does not collect data on sales of any kind of egg other than chicken eggs.