Mr. Albright, a schoolteacher turned businessman, and Mr. Weaver, a Mennonite farmer, were fiddling around with feed formulas and henhouse lighting last spring, trying to get Mr. Weaver's hens to lay more eggs. They stumbled onto something too good to be true: Not only were they getting more eggs but, according to a laboratory in nearby Lancaster, their eggs had almost 25% less cholesterol than ordinary eggs.
Other egg producers, you see, have been trying to create a low-cholesterol egg for a long time now and -- except for finding that the eggs of high-producing hens have slightly less cholesterol than the eggs of other hens -- haven't come up with anything. So they tend to assume that Mr. Albright and Mr. Weaver haven't succeeded, either, and that the low-cholesterol claim is nothing but a gimmick aimed at grabbing higher market share.
In fact, some big egg producers in Pennsylvania recently suggested that state regulators pull Mr. Weaver's eggs off store shelves. And the New Jersey Agriculture Department warned Mr. Weaver in a letter that he might be violating that state's egg-marketing law by false advertising. It issued the warning after Paul Griminger, a nutrition professor at Rutgers University, tested Mr. Weaver's eggs for New Jersey and wasn't impressed. "There's nothing to it," he says.