This paper describes a technique that determines how different egg production systems contribute to the sustainable development of egg production. For demonstration purposes data collected from the Netherlands was used to compare a conventional battery cage system to deep litter and aviary systems, which are considered to be more animal friendly. The method was based on three criteria, the first being the identification of important issues pertaining to sustainable development. The next step was to translate these issues into indicators and finally assess how the indicators contribute to sustainable development. The first two criteria were based upon the findings from literature and consultations with experts in this field. The final criterion is based upon analysis of data and numerical and graphical comparisons. A graphical comparison illustrated how far from the target value each system was for each sustainability indicator. Numerical comparisons combined all the deviations for the sustainability indictors to provide an overall score, which demonstrated the overall contribution that a system made to the sustainability of egg production. The sustainability indicators used were economic performance, ammonia emission, energy use, hen and farmer welfare, and egg quality. All the indicators were considered equally important. Overall, battery cages appeared to be the most sustainable of the three systems. Of the two animal-friendly systems, the aviary was more sustainable than the deep-litter system. To improve upon the sustainability, the aviary system needs to improve the farmer welfare and the economic performance. However, these are only temporary conclusions as the effect of weighting the importance of each sustainability indicator needs to be investigated further.