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Marketing Team, from left to right, Maria Garcia Smith, George Bango, and Maria Catinas, offered Gold Medal Savings, at the 2004 Shamrock Show. We were honored to get to see all of the Shamrock Egg buyers from restaurants, cafes, schools, correctional facilities, hospitals, retailers, and resorts from Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and California. Shamrock Golden Yellow Polo wearing VIP's that visited our booth: Marsha Powers, Mary Fountain, Larry Yancy, Bill Hansen, and Mr. and Mrs. John Norton.
SHELL GAME
For Hickman family, eggs bring home the bacon
by Tim Horowitz
staff writer , West Valley View
Operations at Hickman’s Egg Ranch may have changed
over the years, but the family owned business continues to offer its customers the
freshest product while maintaining a strong sense of community.
Bill and Gertie Hickman opened their Glendale business in 1948 with 500 chickens, said the
couple’s daughter, Sharman Hickman, who handles the public relations end of the
business. Eggs were hand gathered back then, she said, and Mom would make all the
deliveries.
“We no longer do things like our parents or our grandparents did,” Sharman said.
Chicks arrive at the ranch when they are one day old and are grown for about 16 weeks
until they are classified as pullets — the age when females begin their laying cycle.
The chickens then are caged and kept in production for about two years.
Currently, the Hickman ranch in Arlington houses about 1.5 million chickens. Every aspect
of the chickens’ environment — from feed and water distribution to the air
temperature inside the hen house — is controlled and monitored by computers.
Once the eggs are laid, they are transported by machines through the processing plant,
where they are inspected, washed and packaged for shipment. All the transport points have
been improved to reduce the possibility of breakage, Sharman said, and the eggs travel
directly off the line into a 45-degree cooler.
A grader from the U.S. Department of Agriculture also is present each working day for
quality control purposes and to monitor the sanitary conditions of the plant, said plant
manager Bob Schroeder. Having the inspectors on site keeps the whole process up to USDA
specifications at all times, he added.
The egg business is a seven-day-a-week operation. Eggs processed and packaged on one day
will leave for the market the next.
“We do roughly 2,500 cases of eggs a day,” Schroeder said. “There’s 30
dozen in a case, so it ends up being around 850,000 to 900,000 eggs a day.”
Hickman’s controls about 70 percent of the market share of the eggs sold in Arizona,
Schroeder said. The company’s product is distributed throughout the Southwest,
including parts of southern California, Colorado and New Mexico, and can be found on the
shelves of just about every grocery store except for Sam’s Club and Safeway.
Even with all its corporate clientele, Hickman’s continues to cater to its loyal
customers who have been around since the beginning. There are about 500 businesses that
receive farm-fresh eggs off the back of a small company truck whenever they have an order
to be filled.
“We still do store and restaurant back-door delivery, because that’s how my
parents started it,” Sharman said.
The Hickmans plan to expand their business this year by building another facility in
Maricopa. The additional plant should be up and running within nine months and will go
online with about 750,000 hens, Schroeder said.
Once completed, the Maricopa facility will house about 2.5 million chickens. An egg
products processing building also will be built at the new location to meet the demands of
the retail and food service industries for products that are further processed and
pasteurized.
For information about Hickman’s Egg Ranch, visit www.hickmanseggs.com.