Gadgetopia

Eggfusion has developed a great gadget for egg producers; a laser engraver that will etch a line or two of text into the shell of an egg. Only the outer 5 percent of the shell is affected by the etching process, and doesn’t mess with the stuff inside at all. What do you engrave on an eggshell? Well, Eggfusion is thinking expiration dates, advertisements, happy birthday messages (I made that one up.) But it appears that you can image pretty much anything you want on the eggs.

Eggfusion is making all of this pretty attractive to egg producers; sounds like the producers will actually be paid to allow their eggs to be etched using equipment owned by Eggfusion. The revenue from advertisers and retailers pays for the equipment and makes it worthwhile to add the engraver to the production line. (According to the Producers section of the website, it’ll run at about 250 feet per minute — that’s a lot of eggs!)

Eggfusion also runs a secondary website — MyFreshEgg.com — where consumers will be able to enter a “traceability code” to track an individual egg’s history. Not sure if I really want that much information, but somebody thinks we need to know.