Running an Egg Delivery Business in Ghana

Why the route makes the money, not the egg

Thirty stops spread across Accra will lose you money by the end of the month. Ten stops on one loop will pay the rider, fill the tank and leave something over. That is the first thing we tell anyone who rings us about starting an egg round, and it is the lesson most new delivery people learn the expensive way.

The egg is the cheapest part of the business once it leaves the henhouse. What eats the margin is everything between the tray and the customer's kitchen: the rider's hours, the fuel, the crates that come back late or not at all, and the eggs that crack on a pothole. A crate that would sell well in Kasoa town can cost you more than it earns if it takes two hours of stop-start traffic to reach it.

So measure in stops per litre of fuel, not in crates per week. Nine shops within a kilometre or two of each other can carry more eggs per hour than one hotel across town. Density is the lever, and every other part of this article exists to protect it.

Be honest with yourself about the first year. Expect the loop to be thin, the rider to sit idle for an hour in the middle of the morning and the cash to arrive late. None of that means the idea is wrong. It means the loop needs more buyers on it before you add a vehicle or a second rider.

The first ten buyers: who pays on time

Start with buyers who already buy eggs every week and who you can reach without a detour. In practice that means provision stores, small supermarkets, bakeries, chop bars that sell egg sandwiches in the morning, and households on a standing order. Hotels and restaurants can wait. They ask for invoices, longer credit and proof of supply, and they will test you on your first missed delivery.

Before any buyer goes on the list, ask three questions. Will they sell through the eggs fast enough to reorder within the week? Can you reach them and still get back to the farm before the midday heat? Will they pay on the day, or on the Friday after? A buyer who answers yes to the first two and no to the third is still worth having, but only with a credit limit written in your book.

Keep the list short at the start. Ten regular buyers who each take three to five crates a week make a better business than forty buyers who take a crate when they remember. Ten buyers give you a predictable crate count, and a predictable count is what lets you plan collections from the farm.

The five checks that matter before a buyer joins a round:

• Their weekly egg use, estimated by them and checked by you over two weeks
• Travel time from the previous stop on the loop, in minutes rather than kilometres
• Payment habit: mobile money on the day, a week late, or never
• Whether they return crates, and how many are still out at their shop
• Who receives the eggs, and whether that person can sign the delivery sheet

If you are still deciding how big the flock behind the round should be, our layer day-old chicks page explains the choices, our breeds guide compares the laying strains, and our Kasoa collection is the quickest way to start. Send us a message on +233 24 915 1503 before you commit to a vehicle, and we will talk the flock size through with you.

Mapping your first loops around Kasoa and Accra

Draw your loops on paper before you spend a cedi on anything. Put the henhouse or the collection point in the centre and mark every buyer. A good first loop takes under three hours of riding and gets you back to the farm by late morning. Anything longer means the eggs spend more time in the heat and the rider spends more time on the road than in front of a buyer.

Around Kasoa, the main road can turn a twenty-minute run into an hour in the late morning. Check the loop at the hour you will actually drive it, not at six when the roads are empty. Market days, and the hour when school lets out, change how long a stop takes too. Write the real travel time beside each leg, and redraw the loop after a fortnight.

Accra's outer neighbourhoods are a different problem. The stops sit further apart and the buyers are spread across estates. Serve one or two neighbourhoods a day, never the whole city. If a buyer sits outside the loop, either add a delivery sum that covers the detour or offer a pickup point on your route. A stop that sits alone on the map costs you a full rider hour, and no crate price covers that.

For the first month, use one rule: no new buyer joins a loop until the loop already has six stops. The newcomer rides along with houses you already visit, and your rider never drives out to a single door.

Rider, pickup or small van: which fits the loop

No vehicle is best in general. The best one fits the loop you have drawn and the crate count you expect in the busiest week of the year, which in Ghana usually means the run-up to Christmas and the weeks before Easter and Sallah.

These are rough guides, not quotes. Start with what you can hire or borrow for a month. A pickup hired by the day will test a loop for far less than a van you have to finance. Buy only when the same loop has run at full crate count for six weeks in a row.

If you want a feel for how a delivery promise works on the supply side, our delivery page sets out how we dispatch chick orders and confirm the cost before payment. The principles carry over to eggs.

A motorbike has no room for spare crates. A bike round only works if buyers hand back their empties on the next visit, or you run out of crates by Wednesday.

Crates, lids and the order of stops

The packing article covers how each egg sits in its cell, so this section is about the round itself. The first thing to fix is the load order. Load the crates so the first stop is nearest the door. Nobody wants to lift twenty crates off the bed to reach the last shop on the loop.

Carry a few spare crates, one for every three buyers on the loop, and inspect them every morning before they go out. A crate with a cracked corner slides on a pickup bed and cracks the eggs on top of it. A lid that does not fit lets dust into the trays, and dust is what the buyer tastes when they open the tray in the back room. A spare crate in the cab costs less than the eggs it saves.

Keep the crates in the cab or under the seat when the loop runs through dust or rain, not on the open bed. Clean and dry crates are the first habit to check, and our guide to washing table eggs explains why a clean shell matters more than a shiny one. For the cell-by-cell packing, read our packing and transport guide before you load your first van.

Keeping eggs cool when the power goes off

Eggs do not need a fridge for a three-hour morning round. They do need to stay out of direct sun and away from a hot vehicle. The trouble starts when a shop has no power, its stock sits in a back room all afternoon, and the buyer blames you for the cracks, even though the eggs were sound when they left the farm.

Use a cool box with frozen water bottles rather than block ice laid on the eggs. Ice on the tray leaves condensation on the shells, and wet shells are how dirt and bacteria move through a crate. Keep the cool box in the shade of the vehicle, shut the lid between stops, and check the inside temperature with a cheap thermometer on the first day, so you know how long your box holds.

Ask every buyer what they do when the power goes off. A shop with a small freezer or a cool room is a safer account. A shop that stores eggs in a hot back room needs smaller, more frequent drops, and you should price that difference into the round. Some buyers will accept a daily drop for a small premium. Others will not, and it is better to know that before the first crate goes out.

A morning that starts at the henhouse at six

The routine is what turns a loop into a business. A delivery round works best on a fixed timetable, and this is the order we would start with on a first month:

1. 5:45: Check the vehicle, the fuel, the cool box, the spare crates and the delivery sheet.
2. 6:00 to 7:00: Collect from the house at first light, count the eggs and set aside cracked and dirty ones.
3. 7:30: Load the crates in stop order, with the first stop nearest the door.
4. 8:00 to 11:30: Run the loop, writing each drop, each crate returned and each payment on the sheet.
5. 12:00: Back at the farm, count the empties and reconcile the cash against the sheet.
6. 3:00: A top-up run, but only for buyers who ordered by noon. Otherwise the fuel is wasted.

Set your collection time by the sun, not by the clock. Eggs collected at first light are cooler than eggs left in the house until mid-morning, and in the dry season the house warms fast once the sun reaches the roof.

Pricing a run from the cost up

Work out what one run costs before you set a delivery sum or a price per crate. The rough method is simple: add up the fixed costs of the morning, add a breakage allowance, then divide by the stops. The figures below are for the arithmetic only. Replace every line with your own fuel receipts and your rider's real terms.

Spread 159 cedis over 12 stops and each stop carries about 13.25 cedis of run cost before any profit. The 36 crates work out to three per stop. If your margin on three crates does not clear 13.25 cedis, the loop loses money even when the rider looks busy.

Our table eggs are listed at 50 cedis a crate of 30, confirmed at order, so you can place a supply order and check the price in writing. Use the price you actually pay your supplier, not the list price on a shop board, when you do this sum. A delivery business that copies a supplier's price without the cost of its own round is guessing. For the wider picture of what a flock earns, our worked egg business example sets out the farm side of the same sum.

The customer who always owes you a crate

Credit is where delivery businesses bleed quietly. A shop that owes three crates does not look like a problem on a Tuesday. By the end of the month, the same shop owes you a week of margin, and the rider has been driving to it for free.

Set a limit per buyer and write it on the sheet. A good first limit is one week of normal orders outstanding. No new crates go out once the limit is reached until the old ones are paid. Take mobile money on the spot wherever you can, because a payment made on the doorstep never turns into an argument on Friday.

Put the terms in writing before the first drop: the price per crate, when payment falls due, what happens to crates not returned, and how you handle a cracked tray. A one-page note signed by the shop is worth more than a promise. We follow the same rule for our own sales. We confirm prices in writing before any payment, and we take mobile money, bank transfer and cash. If you want to supply other shops in your area, our partner page is where to start that conversation. Our FAQ answers the common questions about how orders and payment work on our side.

• Limit: one week of normal orders outstanding, no more
• Payment: mobile money on the doorstep wherever possible
• Crates: a fixed count per buyer, checked at every visit
• Cracked trays: photographed on the day and agreed before the next drop

The one-page sheet that shows which route pays

A delivery business runs on a single sheet of paper, one page per morning. Keep it simple enough to fill in while the rider is holding a crate. The point of the sheet is not to look busy. It is to show you, at the end of the week, which loop makes money and which one only moves eggs.

At the end of each week, add the sheets by route. A loop that sells 30 crates and gets 25 empties back is in a different state from one that sells 30 and gets 30 back. The first has a crate problem. The second has a loop that is paying its way.

Worked example: three loops in one week

Here is a week for a small operator running three loops. The numbers are illustrative. The buying price is 50 cedis a crate and the selling price is 60, which leaves 10 cedis a crate before running costs. The run costs differ because the vehicles differ: a motorbike for the dense town loop and a hired pickup for the wider Winneba road loop. Six mornings run each week.

Loop A is the business. Loop B loses money on a pickup it does not fill. Moved to a motorbike, it still loses about 270 cedis a week, so the honest choice is to merge its five buyers into loop A or drop them. Loop C is 30 cedis short. Three more crates a week, which could come from one busy buyer, would clear it.

The break-even count is the figure to keep on the wall. Divide the weekly run cost by the margin per crate. Loop B on a pickup needs 84 crates a week to break even, and on a motorbike it needs 57. Loop C needs 57 crates against the 54 it sells. Those numbers tell you exactly how many crates a loop needs before it pays a rider's wage.

Mistakes that finish delivery businesses in year one

Most egg rounds that close in the first year do not close because of one big error. They close because of five small habits that compound.

• Buying the vehicle first. A van that runs twice a week eats the margin of the whole route. Rent before you buy.
• Letting credit grow by the week. Each unpaid crate looks small. Thirty unpaid crates spread across eight shops is a month's profit gone.
• Serving every enquiry. A buyer 25 minutes off the loop is a second business, and it will break the first one.
• Skipping the breakage count. Cracked eggs are money thrown out of the back of the vehicle. If nobody counts them, nobody prices them.
• Trusting memory for crates. Crates lent to shops disappear quickly. The sheet is the only record that holds up in an argument.

Checklist before the first stop

1. Vehicle fuelled, tyres checked and the cool box frozen overnight.
2. Spare crates counted, with clean lids and no cracked corners.
3. Eggs collected at first light, with cracked and dirty ones set aside.
4. Crates loaded in stop order, first stop nearest the door.
5. Delivery sheet ready, with yesterday's owed balances written on it.
6. Phone charged and the mobile money number ready for every buyer.
7. Price per crate confirmed for the day, and in writing for any new buyer.
8. Return time agreed with the rider, and the top-up run booked or cancelled by noon.

Questions farmers ask