By Alison Hewitt, Staff Writer - San Gabriel Valley Tribune
Dying Easter eggs may be a time-honored tradition, but for community egg hunts involving thousands of eggs, honoring tradition can be a daunting prospect.
That's why Glendora is turning to something new: pre-decorated egg suppliers.
"We're one of the last cities that still use real eggs, instead of going over to the plastic eggs," recreation supervisor Annie Warner said. "It used to be a lot of work to dye all the eggs, but now we buy them already dyed. That's really nice."
The 6,000 eggs for Saturday's Easter egg hunt arrived Thursday at Glendora's Sellers Elementary School, where 30 crates were packed into one of the cafeteria's walk-in freezers.
"In the old days, we actually used to boil them for the city," said Michelle Curry, the school's director of food services. "We just can't do that anymore. It was like, two days of one employee boiling eggs."
The Easter Bunny's secret backup is an egg factory in Riverside County. Golden Oval Eggs Co. spends most of the year making pre-shelled, hard-boiled eggs for restaurants (think Cobb salad) and grocery stores. But come Easter, some of their boiling vats become dying vats, where hard-boiled eggs are submerged and dyed one of six vibrant colors, marketing manager Henry Markowicz said.
"The trick is to be able to do a large amount of eggs without breaking them," he said. "It goes back to all of us wanting convenience and tradition. People don't have time to decorate."
The factory produces about 25,000 Easter eggs daily, Markowicz said, for a total of a half-million this season.
Glendora bought the eggs via Gelson's supermarket, which supplies them in crates of 180 eggs, or in individual packs of a dozen for anyone to buy as part of their grocery shopping.
But not everyone's turning to the automated Easter Bunny for their weekend egg hunts.
In Azusa, about 150 children on a youth baseball league dyed 900 real eggs. In Diamond Bar, the city purchased 11,000 plastic, toy-and-
candy-filled eggs. A West Covina church will fill 15,000 eggs with candy, La Puente has 8,000 plastic eggs, and San Dimas had more than 3,000 plastic eggs scattered among chocolate eggs at its hunt last week.
While some egg hunt organizers said the labor involved in boiling and decorating thousands of eggs was the reason to turn to plastic, others said plastic, treat-filled eggs were better.
"We used to do real eggs," said Diamond Bar's special events coordinator, Andee Tarazon. "The real eggs are more traditional, but they're just colored, and how many hard boiled eggs can you possibly eat? The kids are a lot happier with the toys and candy. It's very cute."
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