TURNER – Maine State Police on Tuesday were investigating the theft of an estimated $25,000 worth of eggs from Quality Egg of New England.

The company operates at the former DeCoster Egg Farms on Plains Road.

Trooper Michael Chavez said Tuesday that the eggs, which were intended for markets in Asia, are packaged in cartons labeled in English and Chinese. Chavez said he and Trooper Thomas Pappas were investigating two incidents in which eggs were stolen.

The second theft came while police were investigating the first batch of missing eggs, Chavez said. “So this was pretty brazen.”

In all, an estimated 259,200 eggs were taken, said Bob Leclerc, compliance manager for Quality Eggs. Twenty-four pallets, each holding 30 cases of eggs with 30 dozen eggs in each case, were missing, he said.

“That’s a lot of damn eggs,” Leclerc said.

The eggs were part of a larger shipment destined for Asian markets, but may now be headed for the Chinatown sections of Boston and New York, Chavez said.

He said police had several solid leads in the case and were hopeful the public or workers at the egg farm might come forward with information to aid the investigation. Authorities throughout New England were advised to be on the lookout for an unmarked truck transporting eggs without the proper paperwork, Chavez said.

The case is not the largest of its kind, said Lt. Walter Grzyb, a state police detective. Grzyb said a case he worked about 10 years ago involved the theft of more than $500,000 worth of eggs. That case ended with the arrest of three people – two loading-dock workers at the egg processing plant in Turner and a truck driver.

In that case, dock workers would load extra, undocumented truckloads of eggs and the driver would come back and haul the eggs to Massachusetts where he sold them for “a bag of money,” Grzyb said.

Before investigating the case, Grzyb said he hadn’t realized how many eggs fit into a tractor-trailer or how valuable they are.

He said the new case involved a similar mode of operation, and Leclerc acknowledged Tuesday that officials at the egg farm believed the theft may have been internally orchestrated.

“There is some thought that that is the case,” he said.

While they were working to catch the thieves, state police also were looking to help the egg farm put in place safety measures that would help protect against future theft, Chavez said.

The suspects had to have access to a refrigerated box truck or a large tractor-trailer, Chavez said. He said they would also have to have some inside knowledge of the egg farm and the egg shipping trade.

Fork-lift loading equipment would have been needed to move the pallets, and the eggs have to be kept refrigerated to retain their value, he said.

“They knew what they were doing,” Chavez said. “This isn’t the kind of thing where you just back up a pickup truck and load it up with eggs.”