I wish I had good news about eggs, but alas, I do not. Egg prices are soaring again as the bird flu sweeps the US for the third straight year, cutting into supply. On the other side of the equation, seasonal factors have pushed demand up (all that holiday baking and cold winter weather makes people into egg-heads), and consumers have been buying eggs more than normal for the past couple of years. Those conditions aren’t changing anytime soon, especially on the supply side. If I’m searching for a silver lining here, I guess it’s that once you scare yourself enough about the potential implications of the bird flu for humans, you’re not so worried about the price of eggs. But for now we’ll focus on egg prices and the bad news on that front: Supercheap eggs are not on the horizon.
The Egg-nomic Crisis:
If there’s a single product that epitomizes what consumers hate about high prices nowadays, it’s eggs. People buy them regularly and therefore know their exact cost. They’re ingredients in a lot of foods. And if you’re looking for a protein source, they’re one of the healthier alternatives out there that won’t break the bank. Except they’re not so inexpensive anymore.
The cost of a dozen grade-A large eggs hit $4.15 in December, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from $2.51 a year ago. The average price of eggs hasn’t been below $3 since June, and it hasn’t been below $2 since the start of 2022. Wholesale prices paid by entities such as restaurants, grocery stores, and schools are much steeper: According to the global commodities tracker Expana, wholesale Midwest large eggs are $7.27 a dozen; the five-year average is $2.10.
There’s a lot of variation depending on where you live and where you shop — eggs can be a loss leader, meaning grocery stores discount them to get people in the door, and big-box stores in particular price them quite low. Citing data from Circana, Expana said the average cost of large eggs among smaller retailers was $5.31 a dozen. They’re probably cheaper at Walmart and Costco. If you’re in a state with laws about cage-free eggs, you might see higher prices than you would in a state without them.
No one knows when prices will come back down. This interminable bird flu might not be an aberration, and other factors, such as the push to move toward cage-free eggs, may keep prices up, too. The acute causes of this price spike — a drop in supply, a jump in demand — point to long-term structural issues that might stick around.
Uncharted Territory:
“We are all in uncharted territory,” said Brian Moscogiuri, a global trade strategist at Eggs Unlimited, a California-based egg supplier. He added that the industry had lost 26 million birds since October, more than 7% of the total flock. “It seems as bad as it has ever been,” he said, “and the producers don’t really have a recourse.”
In other words, there’s not much relief in sight.
“It seems highly unlikely we’ll see a $2 egg market anytime soon,” said Karyn Rispoli, a managing editor for eggs in the Americas at Expana. “There’s no way for sure to say this is going to go on in perpetuity, but in the near term there doesn’t appear to be any resolution.”
The Persistent Threat of Bird Flu:
The bird flu — or, as it’s formally called, highly pathogenic avian influenza — is not new. A bird-flu outbreak in the US in 2015 led to a spike in the prices of eggs. But that bout of illness lasted only a season; it showed up during a migration period, as wild birds moved across the US, so it hit in the spring and died out in the summer. The problem with the current iteration is that it’s not going away. It’s continuing to spread, in birds and elsewhere — in dairy cows, in cats, and in people.
“By any metric, you look at animal epizootics, basically animal-based-pandemics, this is the largest one we’ve ever had,” said Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine who focuses on highly pathogenic avian influenza and disease modeling. “It’s in the environment. We see it in dairy lagoons. We see it in human wastewater. So it’s ubiquitous at this point.”
Leave a Reply