Egg quality

Breaking strength

The stability of the egg shell is one of the most important quality parameters in a hen’s egg.

With our FEST device we offer you a quick and easy solution for the determination of the breaking strength.

The pure measuring time is 2 seconds for a single egg. Add to this the time required for inserting and removing the egg, and you can comfortably test up to 900 eggs per hour.


Haugh-Units

To determine the Haugh units, the egg is cracked on a flat glass plate after weighing.

The egg white height gauge is then used to determine the egg white height at a distance of approx. 1 cm from the edge of the yolk.

The formula for calculating the Haugh unit is:

Whereby:

  • HU = Haugh-unit
  • h = certain height of the albumens in millimeters
  • w = Mass of the ice in grams

The calculation is done automatically in our software.
Alternatively, you can read out the data from a table.


Yolk color

The color of the egg yolk is traditionally expressed in “Roche values” from 1 to 15.

The name “Roche” refers to the company Roche, which released the color fan shown below a few years ago. Roche was acquired by DSM Nutrition Products GmbH a few years ago.

Our measuring instruments work with an R-G-B sensor whose filter curves correspond to the human eye (3-range method). From the red, green and blue components we calculate the Lab* values from which we then determine the Roche value. In our software, both the Lab* values and the Roche values are stored.


Shell thickness

For the determination of the shell thickness we offer a special micrometer screw, where one measuring surface is rounded. This makes it possible to correctly determine the thickness of the concave (curved) eggshell. The device can be connected to a PC via our data collector.