An egg-citing tour for young professionals

On August 28, The Network for Young Professionals was invited to tour Vital Farms’ egg processing facility in Springfield’s Partnership Industrial Center West, dubbed “Egg Central Station.”

About 35 YPs took the opportunity to see how the facility operates, including Network member Dee King of Guaranty Bank. She left the tour feeling truly ... "egg-cited" about the work Vital Farms is doing. Here’s a first-hand recap of her visit.

Springfield is home to an incredible facility, Vital Farms, that distributes eggs to 12,000 stores nationwide. The Network toured the facility and learned about the operation, which processes nearly 2 million eggs a day in west Springfield.

We put on hairnets, removed all jewelry, and had our hands sanitized by a state-of-the-art automatic handwashing machine so we could get close to the operations. We walked through massive refrigerators housing millions of eggs and learned about the painstaking process Vital Farms goes through in order to sort, clean and package their eggs.

The only thing more impressive than the equipment that handles thousands of eggs at a time, is learning how Vital Farms is the leader in Certified Humane pasture-raised hens. Each hen gets a minimum of 108 square feet of pasture to roam, making the eggs taste better and, of course, improving the quality of life for the hens.

The highlight of the tour for me was when I asked why they chose Springfield. I was told that several years ago when Vital Farms was choosing a city in which to build, they narrowed it down to two cities; both cities would have been an excellent choice. The scale was tipped by the assistance Vital Farms received from the City of Springfield and the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce. Wow!

It was a great experience to get a behind-the-scenes look at Vital Farms and hear how our City officials and Chamber of Commerce helped bring Vital Farms to Springfield!