Famous Mercadona ready-made food product withdrawn after packaging criticism

After selling pre-cooked, wrapped fried eggs for some time, Mercadona has decided to withdraw the product from all its stores. It is one of the supermarket's most popular items, praised by those who say they have no time to cook, but hated by those who consider that the packaging uses too much plastic wrapping.

Until now these fried eggs used to be sold in packs of two for as little as 1.80 euros. The famous Valencia supermarket chain has now withdrawn them from its outlets, but millions are still sold every year via other companies throughout Spain.

The idea for Mercadona's packaged, ready-cooked fried egg comes from the founder of the company Innovation Foods 360, Javier Yzuel. "Times have changed at an incredible speed. Ten or 15 years ago I cooked because I had the time to do so. Now I rarely have the opportunity to do so," he says in an interview with the Portuguese media outlet NiT.

The packaged fried egg is just one more option for quick-fix, pre-cooked dishes, just like the Spanish potato omelette (tortilla), for example, which is also popular in Mercadona (with or without onion). However, the amount of plastic used in the packaging of the now withdrawn product meant that the chain received a lot of criticism. Yzuel's goal is "for the eggs to be sold in packaging made from recyclable fibrous material, but approval processes in Europe are slow."

Yzuel had the idea of making a packaged fried egg while he was studying hotel management in 1998. At first, his proposal did not get the backing 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 started looking for buyers.

"The secret is how to reach a temperature that guarantees food safety and then stop the process. At 65 degrees, the egg coagulates. I created a system that makes it possible to control the internal temperature of the food and then reduce it abruptly," he says. According to him, texture is important because "it shows the degree of temperature control and the ability to obtain liquid yolks and the whites just cooked without overcooking the egg."

To obtain a creamy yolk and a crispy edge, simply heat it in the microwave at home for 30 seconds. In addition to Mercadona, fast food restaurants have also been interested in this product. Today, Innovation Foods 360, based in Teruel, manufactures more than 40,000 packaged fried eggs every day.