In the back storeroom of the Olivera Egg Ranch in San Jose, Ed Olivera Jr., 76, gazed at miniature sepia and grey-tone photographs in an album splayed open on a long steel table. He pointed to a snapshot of fuzzy chicks and then a close-up of chickens in cages.
“I built these when I was a boy. That must’ve been about 66 years ago. It’s changed an awful lot since then,” he said.
The latest change is a big one — Olivera Jr. is shuttering a third-generation family operation that has been around as long as he’s been alive.
A sign of Olivera Egg Ranch is seen on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025, in San Jose, Calif. The family-run business, founded in 1949, is closing next month. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
The 2.7-acre parcel of Diablo Valley Range land on Sierra Road holding a store, a barn of live meat birds for sale, and the 1920s house where Olivera Jr. grew up with lunching ranch workers will be razed for a 25-unit development of single-family houses.
The family intends to close up shop before Easter. According to Tanya, Olivera Jr.’s daughter, the holiday is like any other day now because everyone uses plastic eggs. Those eggs used to be real.
For a spread in The Mercury News on Easter 1987, founder Ed Olivera Sr. embraced a White Leghorn chicken and said: “Easter is our busiest time, yes indeed. The chicken is a very, very efficient little critter. But at Easter, we are pushed up against the rock of Gibraltar.”
In the 1940s, Olivera Sr., returned home after serving in World War II and took a job as an accountant.
Descended from an Azorean Portuguese apricot-farming family, he began raising chickens on the side and purchased an apricot farm in the Piedmont Foothills on the east side of San Jose.
In 1949, the year his first child Ed was born, Olivera Sr. carted 50 chickens to the same spot Olivera Jr. stood looking at pictures.
Olivera Jr.’s earliest recollection of life itself involves eggs. He remembers sitting in a wire mesh egg basket as a toddler, with freshly collected eggs broken around him.
“My father was furious — he could’ve used me to wash the floor!” Olivera Jr. cackled.
The Olivera Egg Ranch grew into a distribution operation that moved its egg growing out of the city beginning in 1970 to places where people were more tolerant of the aromas of farming.
The “ground zero” of the business in San Jose became the family’s processing, packaging and distribution center and a store known across the Bay Area as the place to go for chicken eggs.
In his later years, Olivera Sr., who died in 1998, was also selling live birds, freshly slaughtered chickens, goose eggs, duck eggs, quail eggs and the Southeast Asian delicacy of balut, fertilized fetal duck and quail eggs incubated on-site.
The Oliveras’ distribution grew until the four corners of its range were staked in Greenfield (Monterey County), San Francisco, Sacramento and parts of Fresno County. At its height, the company owned 715,000 egg-laying hens and employed over 80 workers.
Over the past years of recalls, a global pandemic, avian flu and price shocks, the ranch maintained a reputation as one of the region’s last strongholds of fresh, affordable, trustworthy eggs.
But Olivera Jr. realized the industry was becoming more volatile than ever, dominated by mega-barn competitors whose economies of scale were impossible to match.
He flashed a phone photo from Mar. 17, 2020, of people lined up outside his store to buy eggs days after the COVID-19 pandemic began. “It was like the toilet paper,” he marveled, imitating how people had shuffled like penguins in a line, inching their stockpiles of eggs toward the register.
Then came a one-two punch of customer loss due to mass shutdowns and then a free-fall of prices driven by the oversaturation of eggs in the rebounding market.
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“I was getting kind of concerned — what if something happens to me? No one has the knowledge of the business. I had it all. Still have it all. My family would be left literally holding the bag,” Olivera Jr. said.
He joked that current egg prices almost make him wish he had hung on, and he might have, too, if he were just 10 years younger.
“I could’ve made more money in the last three months than I sold my ranch for, as long as I didn’t get bird flu,” he said.
But the Oliveras are bowing out. The once predictable five-year hills and troughs of boom and bust are gone, seemingly forever — the highs could make you rich like never before, but the lows could finish you within a billing cycle.
Tanya said it has been hard witnessing the devastation that the H5N1 virus has wreaked upon their multigenerational egg suppliers, whose families have been intertwined with hers for decades.
In the summer of 2023, the Olivera family sold their entire distribution operation to the Hidden Villa Ranch company, the nation’s 20th-largest egg producer. That September, they sold their last egg-producing birds at the ranch in French Camp to the Pleasant Valley family farm.
On any given day, customers still stream into the retro store from all over the Bay Area, reaching through a clear vinyl curtain to grab eggs.
Cher Madrid carried five dozen eggs in her arms on Wednesday.
She moved to San Jose 20 years ago after marrying her husband, who had grown up in the city. She learned to cook from her late mother-in-law, who preferred the chicken eggs and balut at Olivera’s.
“She thought it was fresher here, and I would say it is,” said Madrid.
Customer Cher Madrid carries packs of eggs she bought at Olivera Egg Ranch on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Tanya has no idea where folks will go next or what’s ahead for herself and the handful of remaining employees after Olivera’s shuts. She’ll always be a “stupid egg person,” scoping out products at markets and cultural events and caring for 12 rescues from the live meat barn that lay eggs just fine.
“It’s really emotional,” she concluded. “I’ve been here my whole life.” Her daughter Isabela, now 22, took her first steps in the back office.
Third-generation owner Tanya Olivera at Olivera Egg Ranch on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
When asked if he had ever wanted to work in any other field, Olivera Jr. shook his head. “But for giggles,” he added, “I have a B.A. in mathematics and a master’s in physics. The physics of breaking eggs, I guess. My education in business, though, was in hard knocks.”
It’s tough leaving the business. “I’m leaving the memories,” he said. “It’s all tied in with my parents.”
He will still tend to 30 chickens at home, much as he did when he was a boy helping his father.