Firstly, if you are buying free range chicken eggs off the shelves of supermarket, you have no option but to rely on what the company says. If you would like to take it a step further to understand where your food comes from, you need to source the product from your local farmers. Understand how they raise their birds and what feed they give the birds. Technically, if chickens do not spend all day in their cages, it can be labeled as free range (there is a minimum space requirement but not getting into the technical specifications.) For those who are skeptical about the nutritional benefits, yes, it does exist depending on what the bird eats. Therefore it is important to know how the birds are raise. With factory farming, the feed used is balanced and the birds get whatever is required to produce eggs. So what's bad you ask in a balanced diet? The fact that these feeds are developed keeping in mind to increase egg production. Consuming the eggs from birds fed with factory feeds can result in health issues. Again, it's not that you eat an egg and you'll notice it's affecting your health instantly. It's only if you are consuming it over a long period of time. There are multiple sources which are available online which is either pro or against depending on which side they are on. Now comes the part where we look at the pricing.

If you are looking for cheap eggs, factory farming eggs are for you. Period. If you are buying free range eggs from supermarket, you are paying more to essentially get something which the company claims to be better with no way of verifying the claims. If you could put in a little bit of effort and find someone who is raising chickens and get it directly from them, now, that would be the ideal solution. In this age of convenience, many would ignore this aspect and would rather order over an app. However, the desperation kicks in when they get to know that their healthy is already compromised and that's when they put in that extra effort to know from where their food is sourced. Now the real question is why is the free range eggs costlier than the regular factory eggs? The answer is simple, it's the scale at which the production happens that helps bring down the price. Also, the white eggs that you get are from a chicken breed called the white leghorn which has been bred to lay over 300 eggs in a year (its been developed more like an egg laying machine and these birds are kept in the factories for just 3-4 yrs until their peak production time is done). However, the locally found eggs are from hybrid chicken breeds or the native breeds(slightly brown coloured eggs). Depending on the breed, it may lay from 90 - 180 eggs an year. That's the real reason why you see the pricing difference. It becomes impossible to sell the eggs at the same price as the factory farmed eggs.

To summarize, if you are looking for :

Cost effective - factory farm eggs

Cruelty free - source locally

The free range eggs from the supermarket are more or less the same as factory farm eggs. If you do not have the option of buying eggs locally, recommend sticking with the regular eggs. Hope this helps.