The air smells of thousands of boiled eggs as soon as you enter the hall at the Obermeier poultry farm. A very special high-tech machine is at work here, one of the most modern Easter egg dye spraying systems in Germany. In any case, the managing director Franz-Josef Lohner assures us. The good piece that turns white eggs into rainbow eggs costs one million euros. The ground in front of the machine is covered in pink and purple paint. Gray cardboard egg cartons are stacked against the wall, next to them canisters of orange, green, red and blue paint.
The machine doesn’t do everything for Lohner. The 29-year-old has to work hard in the weeks leading up to Easter. The farm in Niederbergkirchen (Mühldorf district) has been very busy for two months. 200,000 eggs are dyed here every day. Currently, Lohner, his wife Marion and some of the 40 employees are working in three shifts, 16 hours a day, seven days a week so that the Easter Bunny has something to hide.
Looks like a particle accelerator, but it’s actually a state-of-the-art Easter egg dyeing machine.
(Photo: Mark Siaulys Pfeiffer)
The Lohners sell around twelve to 15 million Easter eggs a year – mainly to food retailers, but also at weekly markets. At the Obermeier poultry farm, Easter begins as early as August, when the Easter orders come in. Dying starts in January because the supermarkets sell the first Easter eggs in the fourth week of the year.
It takes exactly 46 minutes for an ordinary hen’s egg to go through the transformation and finally come out of the plant wrapped. Fluffy feathers are still hanging from some eggs when a machine arm with 60 blue suction cups lifts them onto the conveyor belt for the seven-meter-long cooking tunnel. In the tunnel, the eggs are preheated in a water bath so that the shell does not crack. Only then are they cooked at 92 degrees Celsius for 14 minutes. Nothing is left to chance: the temperature for size M eggs is set so that the yolk is cooked until it is soft as wax. That is the trademark of the Obermeier eggs, says Marion Lohner. After cooking, an employee checks the eggs for breakage, about 1.5 percent have to be sorted out.
Next up is coloring. Lohner’s super machine sprays purple, red, yellow, green, orange or blue onto the still hot eggs, which are held in place by small metal grippers. Sometimes the same color comes on the egg twice, sometimes the primer first, then a pattern. Rainbows, stripes or one color for Easter, white with black dots for the World Cup – Lohner’s sprayer has it all. At the G-7 summit there were Bavarian eggs – white with blue stripes, golden ones at Christmas. And on Halloween, Lohner dyed the eggs black as charcoal.
The wet paint still gleams on the eggs, which line up to the cooling tower and are placed in the tower by suction cups, row by row. For 15 minutes, the colorful eggs float up and down like in endless paternoster elevators. This cools them to less than 35 degrees, which interrupts the cooking process.
A six-pack of Easter eggs – the machine can fill them automatically.
(Photo: Mark Siaulys Pfeiffer)
Finally, suction cups place the eggs in star-shaped plastic packaging. Of course with the Bavarian flag on it. The system automatically sticks the labels on the stars: “Best before April 27th.” Thousands of dyed eggs are stacked on pallets across from the wall. How many exactly? Franz-Josef Lohner taps again briefly on his mobile phone, on which he has an overview of the entire world of eggs – including the current listings on the egg exchanges. The mobile phone has the answer ready: There are 162,000 eggs that are loaded onto trucks and driven to the central warehouse no later than the day after dyeing. On this day, the Lohners dye around 50,000 eggs in rainbow colors for Edeka.
By no means all eggs come from their two poultry farms in Niederbergkirchen and Obermoosham. Only five percent of her eggs this year will come from her 11,000 chickens, which lay about 10,000 eggs a day and mostly live free range. Otherwise it is up to 50 percent of the colored eggs. But her chickens are suffering from old age – their eggs are no longer suitable for dyeing because their shells break easily. That’s why the Lohners mainly use eggs from partner companies in Bavaria. Dying isn’t her only source of income, even if it’s “a nice mainstay,” says Lohner. For example, they also sort fresh eggs according to size, breakage and packaging or process their eggs into noodles. A total of two and a half million eggs are channeled through the Obermeier poultry farm every week.
Marion and Franz-Josef Lohner continue the business that Franz-Josef’s grandparents founded in 1965.
(Photo: Mark Siaulys Pfeiffer)
Together with his wife and parents, Franz-Josef Lohner continues to run the family business that his grandparents founded in 1965. Dissatisfied with store-bought Easter eggs, his mother decided, “Now let’s make it ourselves!” In 2004 they bought the first machine; she managed 3000 pieces per hour, but at some point that was no longer enough. “We didn’t get it through and had to turn customers away,” he says. In 2016 they bought the new machine. The system boils, colors and packs 12,000 eggs per hour. She not only packs eggs in boxes of six, ten or 30, but also in star-shaped boxes. She also has – as the expert raves – “individual egg recognition” and is artistically talented at least to some extent.
In the off-season, the dye works continue, but only with 150,000 eggs per week. Then it’s not Easter eggs, but regional snack eggs. Or companies order eggs in their colors and with their logos to give away to their customers.
On the farm in Niederbergkirchen, the spray nozzles hiss every second. But soon it will be over: the system will be switched off on Good Friday. “It’s very magical when it’s so quiet,” says Marion Lohner. “Then it’s Easter.”