July 2010   |   Issue #9

Understand, the structuring of the email domain as "first initial-last name" was just an accident. But when you write to Clint Hickman of Hickman's Family Farms — producers of the majority of the eggs sold in Sprouts — you are writing to "chickman." They couldn't have planned it any better.

Clint, the Vice President of Sales and Marketing, is a third-generation egg producer. His brother, Glenn, is the President and CEO; brother Billy is the Vice President of Operations; and sister Sharman heads up Public Relations. As Clint walks around his huge egg farm in Arlington, AZ, he smiles and needles a few of his teenage nephews, who, he says, are in the "work-study program."

The Hickman's history in the egg business officially dates back to 1944, when their grandmother, Nell, raised a backyard flock of 50 hens and began selling eggs to a store in Glendale, AZ — just a typical mid-century small, local, family-run farm business. She eventually grew the flock to 500. Then in 1958, her son Bill (Clint's dad) quit his job with Standard Oil, joined the family business, and bought another 1,000 birds.

"When my grandmother started the business," notes Clint, "there were thousands of little egg companies all around the country. When my parents got into the business, there were a couple thousand. In 1993, we officially became the last commercial egg company in Arizona. Today there are only a couple of hundred egg companies left in the entire country." Because of this very personal history, Clint is passionate about the concept of family farming — attending conferences, supporting industry groups, doing everything he can to help keep them alive.

"Our country is in jeopardy of losing its food supply," he says wistfully as he angles his SUV past a security gate. "Farming at its core, even to this day, is hard work. And it is dirty work. It is hot work. The families that are left in farming have had to become more efficient, and they have to really love what they do."

Yet while the consolidation of the business has imperiled many smaller and less efficient operations, it has ultimately been a bonanza for Hickman. By 1998, they still had just 300,000 chickens under their roof; in the last 12 years, through a building boom, a series of innovative partnerships with everyone from Arizona Grain to the Ak-Chin Indian tribe to the Sam Lewis prison, that number has grown to nearly 5 million. Hickman now has cage egg facilities in Grand Junction, CO, Arlington/Buckeye and Maricopa, AZ, and a cage-free farm in Valley Center, CA. They have created a thriving organic fertilizer business using the byproducts of their operations. They have begun hauling green waste from schools and municipalities, converting it into compost, and reselling it to cities and golf courses. They even take eggs with imperfect shells and convert them into pasteurized liquid eggs or hard-cooked eggs. "There is history and experience behind every decision we make out here," says Clint.

The Arlington facility is not exactly some picturesque slice of Americana. No "American Gothic" here. The farm sits out in the wasteland of Arizona desert, a "moonscape" near a landfill and the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant, hemmed in by fences. Then again, you wouldn't want "American Gothic." Green fields and crops would attract rodents, which could introduce salmonella into the flock. And Hickman is nothing if not zealously protective of food safety. Passing by one of six pullet houses where the baby chicks are raised — workers are confined to one house only to minimize any risk of exposure — Clint thinks of his own baby chicks. "I want to make sure that whatever I am producing I feel confident in feeding my own kids, because I am feeding other people's kids, too."

But inside — well, inside, the farm really is a work of art. Sleek and impeccably clean (approaching cars must have their tires treated with germicides, and visitors must wear protective coverings from head to toe), the facilities are a cross between farm and Futurama. The henhouses are two football fields long, efficiently oriented to catch cross breezes from the giant fans that blow through water pads lining the walls. There are 175,000 birds that are organized by age and hence by egg size, pecking away at corn and soy meal (Hickman's chickens go through 100-train-car loads of corn per month), fulfilling some ancient biological imperative by laying an egg every 26 hours. There is an ever-present hum of clucking and squawking, which grows in crescendos when a stranger walks by the coops (the hens recognize and are calm around their caretakers, but react with alarm to the unfamiliar — in which case feathers literally fly).

The eggs get gently swept up on one conveyor belt after another, ultimately wending their way to an amazing $2 million Rube Goldberg-like machine made by the Dutch company Moba. The Moba machine sorts eggs by size, washes them with water and a special egg soap, seals them with mineral oil, photographs every egg inside and out in search of irregularities, bathes them in ultraviolet light to kill any bacteria, lifts them into cartons using a World War II bomber bay-type system, and then packs the cartons into shipping boxes. "This is the machine that almost brought tears to my Mom and Dad's eyes," says Clint with a laugh, remembering more than one problem on the old manual packing lines that led to an I Love Lucy-like chocolate factory fiasco.

All of that just so customers like you can experience farm-fresh eggs, the same way Nell Hickman's customers did in 1944.

Through all the efficient design and automation, though, one thing is clear: this is still a business run by people. People who have a great passion for their flock, for their eggs, and for their customers. You can see it in the faces of everyone who works there — several of whom bear a striking resemblance to each other.

For the Hickman family, their business has grown so much that they can hardly keep up with demand. They now supply many major supermarket chains and restaurants around the southwest and west, and even ship fresh eggs to Hawaii. They have recently reached the top 15 in egg sales in the country. Sprouts has been a major part of that growth — buying eggs from Hickman for our first store in Chandler, AZ, in 2002, and eventually asking Hickman to expand their distribution into Colorado, Texas and California to meet our needs in those states. They were only too willing to accommodate. After all, they know what it's like to try to build a family business.