What's going on with US egg prices?
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Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Matt Lyons. On today's programme, what is happening to egg prices in the US? The average price for a dozen eggs reached $6.23 in March, more than tripled the long-term average of $2. Given the average American eats 280 eggs every year, it's hit consumers hard. They have to pay for their eggs.

I have to say I'm not buying them at the supermarket often, but it is becoming something that I take into consideration more than I have in the past when I'm going out to lunch. The price rise comes at a time when breakfast is booming for the U.S. restaurant industry with omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros on more and more menus across the country. We go through about six or seven cases of eggs a week.

So with the increase in prices, we're looking at an increase of about $1,400 to $1,600 a week in expenses just to buy eggs. However, are things starting to improve for businesses and shoppers? Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed wholesale egg prices had started to go down, although it seems that reduction hasn't yet trickled down to stores. We'll be finding out why the price of eggs in particular has risen so quickly. And given the fluctuating price, do we need to look for an alternative?

We produce eggs that are not eggs. We found a bean called the mung bean that has a protein in it that actually scrambles like a chicken egg. What's going on with egg prices in the US? That's coming up on today's Business Daily.

It's been hitting the headlines for months and was a big talking point on the US election campaign trail, with now-President Donald Trump vowing to solve it when he got into office. Speaking last week, he claimed it already made an impact on egg prices. Eggs have gone down 25% in the last couple of weeks. We inherited that problem, eggs.

Is he right? Well, in one sense, yes. The wholesale price, so the price for suppliers, for restaurants and stores, has fallen and sits at just over $3 a dozen for white eggs, well below the $8 high seen in March. But for people buying eggs in their groceries, that drop hasn't been seen yet. And it's been a tough few months for consumers, with reports of a dozen A-grade eggs getting close to $10 in some places.

and the Bureau of Labour Statistics saying in February that US cities were seeing the highest price in a decade. So how much are these price changes affecting businesses? And is it stopping their customers buying their favourite foods? Kizzy Cox went out in New York to find out.

I'm in Tribeca, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City. Here you'll find beautiful lofts for rent and to own, fancy boutiques selling designer clothing, high-end art galleries, and Square Diner, which has been a part of this community for over 100 years. It serves up homey American comfort food, and as is fitting of its super cool location, it's also been the site of film shoots and fashion shows. But the diner, which you'll find on a quaint cobblestone street,

hasn't been insulated from rising egg prices. I'm going to go inside and meet the owner, Ted Karunos, and hear how this price hike has been affecting business. I didn't realize you were coming in. There you are. I'm Kishi. Hi, pleasure to meet you, Kishi. I'm Ted. All right, so I took a look at your menu. You have lots of eggs on the menu, lots of omelets.

How have these egg prices been affecting your business? There's a dramatic effect, unfortunately. We were doing the math and we go through about six or seven cases of eggs a week. So with the increase in prices, we're looking at an increase of about $1,400 to $1,600 a week in expenses just to buy eggs. So what have you been doing to kind of absorb this price? Are you passing it along to the customer? What's your plan for how to absorb this?

Well, we haven't done a surcharge. We're avoiding that, but we'll be taking it into account during our annual price increases that we do every year. When you're a restaurant owner, if you don't raise your prices every year, you're kind of giving yourself a pay cut every year because prices always tend to go up or expenses do.

So every April I tend to raise my prices, and this year we'll take a long, hard look at the egg plates and see what we need to price them at. But you're not cutting any of those wonderful omelets, any of those wonderful egg dishes? You know, in my mind, one of the main things that make a diner a diner is breakfast all day, and you can't be serving breakfast all day if you're not serving eggs. So there's no cutting back on eggs. That's an impossibility for us. We have to buy them no matter what they cost us.

Going out to eat, I certainly notice the difference. I order eggs.

daily. I have to say I'm not buying them at the supermarket often, but it is becoming something that I take into consideration more than I have in the past when I'm going out to lunch. What bothers me more is there seem to be fewer eggs on the shelves. It looks kind of COVID-y again when you go to the supermarket and there are not that many eggs there.

One of our places in Florida now has an egg surcharge. 75 cents an egg. Yeah, for a three-egg omelet. I mean, it's really getting up there, you know? I feel lucky that I can still afford to buy eggs. That's how I feel. I don't know what I would do if I was on a very tight budget because a dozen eggs are eight something. And that's not fancy eggs. That's, you know, the grocery store brand. That used to be the fancy eggs. Yeah.

Yes, now the grocery store band is the same price as what the fancy eggs used to be. Yeah, you know, people with big families and stuff, it must be just a nightmare. Customers at Square Diner in New York, they're speaking to Kizzy Cox. Now, it's not just small-scale restaurants having to increase prices. Some large-scale chains, including Waffle House and Denny's, have announced temporary surcharges on egg products.

Stores have limited the number of eggs customers can buy, including Trader Joe's, and there are reports that some branches of Costco and Whole Foods have done the same. So what causes the price of a staple to quadruple in such a short space of time? Mark Jordan is Executive Director and Senior Livestock Economist at Leap Analytics in the US.

Basically, highly pathogenic ABA influenza is the primary cause, and it's been a significant impact that has accumulated over, really, just over three years now. It's actually, and this is probably a frustrating aspect to it that has all industry stakeholders a little bit confused.

confused as to how to combat it. The severity has ebbed and flowed in a manner that is very unpredictable, very volatile. I mean, I think this says it all. If you can just look since December 1st, we have lost a little over 43 million or almost 44 million hens just since December 1st. And for a little context, that's almost 15% of the laying flock. So that's a pretty hefty loss total for a fairly short amount of time.

And there's also the fact that there's been increased demand with the rise of breakfast restaurants and eggs as a protein source in the fitness industry. So has that added to the issue? I really like to highlight the 1990s as probably the modern depressed era

period for eggs, egg consumption, egg demand. That was when there was probably a lot of bad press around eggs and cholesterol. You also didn't have quite as much maybe interest in protein-based products as we've seen more recently. Protein has been, just generally speaking from all sources, has been that stronger interest the last few years. And yes, the expansion

Expansion of whether fast food or some kind of quick serve where we've got a lot of convenience stores and whatnot that now have ventured into and basically breakfast on the go is become a huge thing over the last 20 years. It all culminated for me in 2019. You had per capita egg consumption, at least in the United States, was at its highest level in almost 50 years.

But that may not be all that's going on. Amanda Starbuck at campaign group Food and Water Watch has been looking into the industry and says the intensive farming practices within it may have exacerbated the speed of the spread. That's one thing that I think really has been missing in media stories around this. It's more just look at this poor industry that's being hit by this bird flu outbreak without any consideration into the practices of that industry and how it does contribute to exacerbating this crisis.

So companies like CalMaine have about a million birds per egg operation. And there are companies that go beyond that. There are egg operations, for instance, there was one in Iowa that had over 4 million birds that had to be culled when it was hit with bird flu.

So not only are these intensive farming and these factory farms making it much more likely that disease will spread, it also magnifies the impact of a single outbreak. At the beginning of March, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice had launched an investigation into the surging price of eggs to look at potential price fixing or gouging as it's known.

When I asked them for a statement on this, the DOJ declined to comment. Here's Amanda Starbuck again. So in the US, there are about 10 leading egg producers that produce about half of all eggs that are eaten here. And CalMaine alone produces about one of every five eggs eaten in the US. So they're the major player. So what we did for this is we looked back at that first year of the outbreak...

including January 2023, where we saw one of the largest price spikes ever. That was only eclipsed by January and February of 2025. And what we found is that egg production really did not change very dramatically, neither did the total number of hen flocks. We're talking like maybe as much as 7% decrease over the five-year average.

The prices skyrocket as much as two and a half times the five-year average. And what's, I think, most remarkable is CalMaine during its fiscal year 2023 did not experience a single outbreak in any of its blocks. Yet it still raised its prices to match those soaring national prices. That tells us a couple things. It tells us that CalMaine has enough market power that it could raise prices and not worry about being undercut by competitors.

So we're seeing a system where egg producers that maybe aren't even experiencing shortages have enough market power to raise their prices without any repercussions. At the start of April, CalMain acknowledged it was being investigated by the antitrust division of the US Department of Justice. CalMain says it's cooperating with the investigation. We did approach them to speak to the programme but received no response. However, I did speak to Emily Metz, president of the American Egg Board, which represents producers...

and promotes egg consumption. I chuckle because everyone wants there to be a boogeyman, and that's just not what there is. The boogeyman here is the laws of supply and demand. We have very, very tight supply, supply that is tighter than it's ever been before. Again, those numbers speak for themselves. 30 million alone lost birds since the start of this year.

And then when you look at demand, which continues to remain high and for the last 23 months has actually been at record high levels. So you have incredibly high demand and then you have very, very tight supply. You're going to see the prices that you see. You are listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

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I'm Matt Lyons, and today I'm looking at the impact of rising egg prices in the U.S.

I live on Johns Island, South Carolina, which is right on the coast by Charleston, South Carolina. We started about 10 years ago with a few thousand laying hens selling to the local restaurants. So it's grown rapidly in those 10 years. So now we have several locations. Our other main egg farm is about two hours north in Clarendon County, South Carolina. Wow.

That's Jeremy Storey of Storey Farms. For him, it's been a numbers game, not having enough hens to produce the number of eggs needed to meet demand for his customers. There we have 18,000 laying hens. So I originally had ordered 30,000 birds, which we order pullets, which are birds that are at the age of being ready to lay. So typically you get 17 week old birds in and within a few weeks they start laying eggs.

And then those younger birds will lay basically at about a 95% lay rate. So really efficient, really great quality eggs. As they get older, after about 14 months of laying, their productivity goes down to about 85%. And then putting them through the molt can put them back up to around 90% for a while. And then you can get maybe 10 months out of them. And then at the end of that, they'll be at about 80%. So it's definitely not

as profitable doing it that way. But yeah, we had 30,000 pullets ordered for December and we were only able to get 7,500 of those. So fortunately, you know, it was devastating for us to hear that news, but fortunately, frantically making a bunch of calls, we were able to allocate some of the older birds and put them through the mold.

which was tough financially because it's about a two-month process of feeding all of these birds, which is expensive to feed that many birds for two months without getting anything back. But once they do start laying with the market the way it is, the sales are unlimited. How big of an issue has this been for the industry and for farmers like yourself? I think it varies from location to location. I think in the egg industry as a whole,

If you didn't get hit with avian influenza, it's been record-breaking profits for these companies. And I don't know anyone else that has a company of my size, which is very small on the large scale of the egg industry, but I don't know any other farmers that do all their own direct sales and processing themselves. So they're typically a farmer like myself. They're just contracted with a larger company. So if they haven't gotten hit with

avian influenza, it doesn't affect them. I think bigger companies, you know, if they haven't gotten hit on a large scale, it's produced record-breaking profits for them. I mean, yeah, typically, you know, a white conventional egg goes for a wholesale price, you know, somewhere around a dollar, a little over a dollar a dozen. And now they've hit eight plus dollars. I think it's coming down now. But yeah, literally, you know, seven to eight times the sale price on their products. You

You're talking millions and millions of birds. That's a lot of money. But yeah, I think it's been devastating for some companies that have gotten hit really hard where huge facilities have been decimated by it. You mentioned earlier about having to get creative to maintain the number of birds you need to produce what you need for your customers. Is there enough support for the industry or is that something that you've had to do on your own back? Oh,

Honestly, I don't know if there's support out there. I haven't gotten any. We have contacts of different companies. I've used transport companies that their job is to come in and take out birds from facilities and transport them either to another farm or to a rendering facility. So I've made calls to see, hey, do you have any birds available and this and then

So we've gotten creative that way. But yeah, it's just kind of the connections that I have with other people in the industry as far as like governmental support. I don't know if these larger companies have access to that or not. But yeah, it's something that we've had to do on our own. The Trump administration has confirmed plans to import eggs from Turkey and South Korea, with other countries being contacted as well. Here's Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins speaking to reporters at the White House.

We are talking in the hundreds of millions of eggs for the short term. So not insignificant, but significant enough to help continue to bring the prices down for right now. And then when our chicken populations are repopulated and we've got a full egg laying industry going again, hopefully in a couple of months, we then shift back to our internal egg layers and moving those eggs out onto the shelf. So how effective would that be? Here's livestock economist Mark Jordan again.

I'm of the mindset when there's a supply constraint, anything helps. Anything on the margin is going to help to some extent. It might be somewhat limited. If you're talking maybe a half a percent, 1% in total supply. And again, I don't want to dismiss that because we've seen how volatile markets can be, say losing three and five and 8%. So getting a half a percent back, 1% back is,

That would help. This is a market that's highly inelastic, basically meaning are very volatile in response to small changes in availability. So just getting a little bit back, you know, could create some fairly significant price relief. Of course, non-egg eaters, those with allergies, vegans, would say there are plenty of alternatives out there to eggs. People like Josh Tetrick, CEO of the biggest company in the plant-based egg alternative market, Eat Just, known for its Just Egg product.

We produce eggs or not eggs. We found a bean called the mung bean that has a protein in it that actually scrambles like a chicken egg. And it works just like eggs, except you don't need the animal and all the feed for the animal and all the space and all the land and all the water and all the carbon emissions. And you don't have to deal with all the bird flu stuff. It's impacting egg prices today because you can cram mung beans in as tight a space as you want and they're never going to get sick.

In February, the US Department of Agriculture unveiled a $1 billion plan to lower the price of eggs, including boosting biosecurity measures, vaccine research and investing in pharma financial relief programs. That's expected to take about six months to implement.

Alongside that, a bipartisan bill has been proposed in Congress that aims at lowering prices by cutting regulations with the aim of allowing farmers to sell more of their eggs in the hope of easing supply issues. But it's not going to be straightforward and bird flu isn't going away. At the start of this week, the state of Ohio, where many of the cases have been recorded, reported its first outbreak since early March.

That's it from today's edition of Business Daily, presented by me, Matt Lyons. Thanks to all my guests for taking part, and thanks to you for listening. You can hear more episodes of Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations, and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...

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