Maine eggs headed for Cuba Food export embargo ends after 43 years

PORTLAND – For the first time since the Communist Revolution in 1959, American eggs, many of them from Maine, will arrive in Cuba next month.

Radlo Foods of Watertown, Mass., announced a $500,000 contract Thursday to export 10 million fresh eggs to Cuba. The deal was made possible by a federal law signed in 2000 that reauthorized the direct export of food products and medicine to the island nation.

An estimated 3 to 10 percent of the eggs will come from barns in Leeds and Turner. The facilities, formerly owned by DeCoster Egg Farms, currently employ 75 workers and house more than 1.3 million hens.

David Radlo, owner and president of Radlo Foods, traveled to Cuba in January with a delegation of 25 other food producers and exporters.

On the trip, he met with Cuban President Fidel Castro, who personally authorized the shipment.

Radlo said the Cuban government asked his company to provide brown eggs.

Although white eggs are favored in many U.S. regions, brown eggs are more popular in the Northeast and in Cuba.

An egg’s journey from Maine – trucked to Mississippi before being shipped to Cuba – will take about a week, Radlo said.

Cuba lacks enough feed grain to raise poultry in large quantities, according to Bill Brown of the New England Brown Egg Council.

As a result, the United States recently shipped 20,000 tons of chicken to Cuba. Now eggs look promising.

“It’s a very natural marketplace for us,” he said. “It’s obvious they want to import more.”

Brown said Maine’s egg industry has been fairly stable over the past decade. Valued at more than $80 million a year, eggs trail potatoes and milk as the state’s leading agricultural commodity.

And now they’ve found a new market.

“It has taken 43 years to get this order,” Radlo said. “Hopefully, it won’t take 43 years to get the next one.”