What do the numbers on an egg mean?

Every egg sold in Great Britain or the EU is stamped with a code: a digit, two letters and a number. This reads it from the law that defines it.

It is not a date. That is the single most common thing people take it for, and there is no date in it anywhere. The best before is printed separately.

This one runs on your own device. It is worked out in your browser, so there is nothing to send and nothing to log. Where a tool on this site does send something out, that page says so and names where it goes.

What it is made of

“The distinguishing number shall be composed of a digit indicating the farming method determined in accordance with point 2.1 followed by the code of the Member State according to point 2.2 and an identification number defined by the Member State in which the establishment is located.”

The farming method digit

DigitFarming method
0Organic production
1Free range
2Barn
3Cages

Those four come from two separate tables, which is why the numbering looks the wrong way round. Point 2.1 gives 1, 2 and 3. Then a second table, under a different regulation entirely, adds 0 for organic production.

It reads as a single scale from best to worst, and it was not written as one. Nought is not “one better than one” by design — organic was added later and took the number that was spare.

The country codes

27 member states, as the Annex lists them:

CodeMember stateCodeMember stateCodeMember state
ATAustriaESSpainMTMalta
BEBelgiumFIFinlandNLNetherlands
BGBulgariaFRFrancePLPoland
CYCyprusHUHungaryPTPortugal
CZCzech RepublicIEIrelandRORomania
DEGermanyITItalySESweden
DKDenmarkLTLithuaniaSISlovenia
EEEstoniaLULuxembourgSKSlovakia
ELGreeceLVLatviaUKUnited Kingdom

Greece is EL, not GR

It is the European Community’s own abbreviation, and it is not the one anybody guesses. A Greek egg reads 2EL…, and GR appears nowhere in the table.

And Croatia is not in it at all

The Annex has been amended twice — by the 2003 Act of Accession, and by Directive 2006/83/EC for the accession of Bulgaria and Romania. Croatia joined the European Union in 2013, and the table has not been touched since 2007.

So there is an EU member state whose eggs carry a country code that the law defining country codes does not list. The tool above says so when it meets one, rather than inventing an entry or calling the code wrong.

The last part is not this law’s to give

The digits after the country code identify the farm, and the Annex declines to say how:

“Each Member State shall implement a system to attribute a unique number to each establishment to be registered”

— and “Member States can add further characters to the identification number”. So the producer is traceable, through a register each country keeps. It is simply not traceable from the code alone, and this page does not hold those registers.

That makes this the fourth source on the site to define a structure and hand one field of it to somebody else, after the railway act, the Hallmarking Act and 47 CFR 2.926. It is a pattern in how these things are written, not an oversight in any one of them.

It is not a date

Worth saying twice, because it is what nearly everyone assumes. The number at the end is a producer’s registration, not a day, not a batch and not a Julian date. Nothing in the stamp tells you when the egg was laid.

The best before date does, and it is printed separately — on the box, and often on the shell beside this code.

A note on where this came from

legislation.gov.uk publishes this directive as it applies in Great Britain, under the Open Government Licence, with its amendment record attached — which is where the dates above come from. The EU consolidated version says the same thing.