Are the City’s Best Eggs in Trouble?
April is a month of promise and optimism at the Union Square Greenmarket. The barren, beet-stained days of winter are over. Vendors have started to show up with bunches of agretti, ramps, and fiddleheads. Soon there will be asparagus. Once again, life will feel worth living. But this past April was marred by a terrible turn — at least for anyone who likes Greenmarket eggs. It was the final market month for Millport Dairy, a Pennsylvania farm whose bundles of hen eggs are held in exceptionally high regard.
“Guys, I’m in the Union Square Greenmarket right now and we have a Defcon 1 level emergency,” the TikTok user @GarettFromGoldies broadcast on April 20. He’d just found out that his egg guy of seven years — “the best, deepest orange yolks in New York City” — had dropped out of the farmers’ market. In a measured tone, he added, “I can’t even describe to you how bad this has ruined not my day but my fucking month.”
The final day at Union Square for John Stoltzfoos, who runs the stand, was this past Saturday, when a line stood 14 customers deep around 11 a.m. There was one bright spot, however: An employee handed out cards that listed an address — 2583 Broadway, just north of West 97th Street — for Millport’s new store on the Upper West Side, which opens today.
“I’d been wanting to do something like this for a while, but things happened pretty quickly since they’ve been making changes,” Stoltzfoos says. The “changes” are new regulations that will be enforced by GrowNYC, the market’s operator: Farmers will have to equip their coolers with thermometers or keep an infrared-thermometer gun handy in order to demonstrate that their products are being held at or below 45 degrees, a temperature required by the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets. Stoltzfoos says he found out about the change when he received his application to renew with the Greenmarket on January 1; he decided to go it alone, largely because the changes felt like an unnecessary burden. An ice chest wouldn’t cut it on 90-degree days, he says, and putting cardboard egg cartons over melting ice wouldn’t work, either. He asked about getting a refrigerated truck, but that could introduce new hassles: “They said, ‘Well, if we get a complaint about noise or the refrigeration then you have shut it down,’” he adds. “Well, then, you’re stuck.”
By mid-April, word about Millport’s departure had started to get around to other vendors. Others say that GrowNYC is enforcing regulations more across the board. (Another egg farmer said the thermometer rule doesn’t bother them.) Zaid Kurdieh — who owns Norwich Meadows, one of the market’s most prominent (and powerful) operations — understands why the changes are harder for smaller farms. “We have a refrigerated truck, most people don’t — it’s an expensive item,” he says. “We’re going to have to put ice packs in, read temperatures. That is very cumbersome.”
Uptown, the Millport Dairy store will be open Wednesdays through Saturdays. There will be pickles (cauliflower, dilly beans, okra, onion), chicken pies and pulled chicken, sausages, bacon (including smoked, Canadian, and country), fresh meat, cheese, baked goods like zucchini bread and whoopie pies, and seasonal produce.
The store will also be — intentionally or not — a new competitor for the Greenmarkets, which vendors say are starting to feel the squeeze as shoppers continue to find alternatives. “It’s really difficult for people who have grown accustomed to getting things immediately to go for the actual experience of going to some place and carrying it back,” says Stewart Borowsky, better known as the Union Square Grassman. His business is down between 25 and 30 percent compared to pre-COVID numbers, and he’s stopped coming to the market at all on Fridays. The Greenmarket, he says, never fully bounced back following the pandemic: “At least that is to say, these markets are surrounded by offices that are no longer full and residences that are no longer occupied on the weekend. It’s out of our control but still impacts us directly.”
In recent years, Kurdieh has turned to chefs, including Blue Hill’s Dan Barber and Noma’s René Redzepi, to collaborate on products as another way to draw in customers. “There are so many more farmers’ markets, there are so many more ways to get direct from farmers these days, that I have to compete on a different level,” he says. As far as any new regulations are concerned, Kurdieh explains: “I want to be able to help navigate through this, but it’s going to take some time and patience.”