Famous Mercadona ready-made product taken off the market after packaging criticism

After selling pre-cooked, packaged fried eggs for some time, Mercadona has decided to remove the product from all its stores. It is one of the supermarket’s most popular products, praised by those who say they don’t have time to cook them, but hated by those who say the packaging uses too much plastic wrap.

Until now, the fried eggs were sold in packs of two for just €1.80. The well-known Valencia supermarket chain has now taken them out of its range, but millions of them continue to be sold every year through other companies across Spain.

The idea for Mercadona’s pre-packaged, ready-cooked fried egg came from the founder of the company Innovation Foods 360, Javier Yzuel. “Times have changed incredibly quickly. Ten or 15 years ago, I cooked because I had time. Now I hardly have the opportunity to do so,” he says in an interview with the Portuguese media company NiT.

The pre-packaged fried egg is just another option for quick, pre-cooked meals, such as the Spanish potato omelette (tortilla), which is also popular at Mercadona (with or without onion). However, the plastic content in the packaging of the product, which has now been withdrawn from the market, has brought the chain a lot of criticism. Yzuel’s goal is “for the eggs to be sold in packaging made of recyclable fiber material, but the approval processes in Europe are slow.”

The idea

The idea of ​​producing a pre-packaged fried egg came to Yzuel in 1998, when he was studying hotel management. At first, his proposal did not receive the support he had hoped for, but after two decades of research, he managed to perfect the product and sell the idea to Mercadona. In 2014, he registered the patent and began looking for buyers.

“The secret is to reach a temperature that guarantees food safety and then stop the process. At 65 degrees, the egg coagulates. I have developed a system that allows you to control the internal temperature of the food and then lower it abruptly,” he says. According to him, texture is important because “it shows the degree of temperature control and the ability to obtain runny yolk and just cooked white without overcooking the egg.”

To get a creamy yolk and crispy crust, just heat it in the microwave for 30 seconds. In addition to Mercadona, fast food restaurants have also shown interest in this product. Today, Innovation Foods 360, based in Teruel, produces more than 40,000 packaged fried eggs every day.