What’s Driving High Egg Prices: Bird Flu, or Corporate Greed?
Bird flu is sweeping through
egg-laying chickens in the United States at an unprecedented rate. So far in
2025, 30 million
layers, as they’re known, have been culled, close to the 38
million killed throughout all of last year: Nearly 10 percent of the
country’s annual number of egg-layers have been wiped out. But one of the big
questions, as egg prices become a potent political football, is this: Are these
shocking infection rates and cull tallies to blame for skyrocketing prices? Or
is something else going on?Last month, Democratic lawmakers including
Elizabeth Warren, James McGovern, and Cory Booker cast doubt on the idea that highly
pathogenic avian influenza, known as HAPI, alone was to blame for soaring egg
prices, writing in a letter
to the Trump administration that “egg producers and grocery stores may leverage
the current avian flu outbreak as an opportunity to further constrain supply or
hike up egg prices to increase profits.” In the past few days, multiple outlets have reported that the
U.S. Department of Justice is now opening an investigation into egg producers’
practices.Trump administration officials have, meanwhile, offered puzzling
and sometimes contradictory insights. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of
health and human services, recently said
that health agencies will not recommend poultry vaccines. (This recommendation
would typically come through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, over which
Kennedy has no jurisdiction.) “We’ve in fact said, at
the USDA, that they should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run
through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that
are immune to it,” Kennedy said on Fox News recently. Brooke Rollins, USDA secretary, suggested that consumers
concerned about egg prices could try their hand at backyard poultry farming. Few people seem to doubt that bird flu is playing some role
in current prices. Food economists say we’re currently seeing a classic example
of what happens when an inelastic product, or something that people typically buy
no matter the price, becomes scarce and retailers begin bidding against each
other to keep their shelves full. “I’m going to bid more than Aldi or Trader
Joe’s is going to bid, because I have to buy those eggs,” is the way Jada Thompson,
an associate professor in agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas,
described the mindset.It’s also clear that some egg producers have been
devastated by the culls. “I
wouldn’t be surprised that some companies go out of business,” Rocio Crespo, a
professor in poultry health and management at NC State University, told me. Smaller
producers who
have lost their entire flocks aren’t able to benefit from high prices right now.But the producers still able to
sell eggs are experiencing a boom. Cal-Maine Foods, the largest egg producer in the country—and
the only one publishing financial
information, because it’s publicly traded—reported in January that net sales nearly doubled in a year, jumping up to $954.7 million in the quarter ending
November 30, from $523.2 million at the same time the previous year. And that was months ago, before prices went this
high.Warren and her fellow lawmakers are
skeptical for a reason: In December 2023, an Illinois jury found five major egg
companies—Cal-Maine, United Egg Producers, United States Egg Marketers, and
Rose Acre Farms—liable for millions in damages after engaging in price
gouging, where the producers intentionally created the conditions of scarcity
by killing hens early or exporting more eggs to other countries in order to
drive up prices.A Food and Water Watch report released last Wednesday found
that retail egg prices even in places without bird flu outbreaks more than
doubled between January 2022 and January 2023. The Southeast region only reported its
first case this past January, and raised more eggs in recent years than before
the outbreak began, yet still saw the same rise in prices as the rest of the
country.Even at the national level, the idea that bird flu has
constrained supply, the report suggested, doesn’t quite fit: “From April to
December 2023, national retail inventories of eggs exceeded the five-year
average by as much as 12.8 percent. Nevertheless, average egg prices exceeded
the five-year average in each month as well.” In 2023, for
example, despite having no bird flu outbreaks, Cal-Maine’s egg prices soared by
more than 700
percent, and the company awarded dividends to shareholders
totaling $250 million—a 40-fold increase from 2022. (Cal-Maine did not respond
to media inquiries by press time.)Still, other experts say, that’s
hardly proof that something sketchy is going on. In order to know whether
companies are engaging in anything underhanded, “you’re going to need a whole
bunch of proprietary data, which I’m going to guess you don’t have—if you do,
please send my way,” Thompson told me. Otherwise, “nobody will be able to tell
you that answer,” she said. “I can’t tell you that there’s no additional
margins being taken somewhere, but I can tell you that HPAI is having—probably
a very large portion of this is going to be related to supply.” And “unless the
government is setting the price, prices are going to be set by market forces,”
she added.Scarcity is far and away the
clearest reason for current price hikes, David Ortega, a food economist and
professor at Michigan State University, told me. “When you have less supply of
eggs and demand is relatively inelastic, then you can expect a pretty
significant increase in the price.” He cautioned against making a “one-to-one”
comparison, expecting egg prices to rise only by about 10 percent because
that’s how far egg inventory has dropped. “That’s the crux of the question: why
are prices 125% up if supplies are only down seven [percent], right?” Thompson
said.But when inventory drops by any
amount, bidding can go much higher. And because of decontamination needs and
the fact that it takes egg-layers between four and five months to reach
maturity, bird flu can take egg facilities offline for about six months. Chickens
raised for meat, on the other hand, are usually slaughtered around eight weeks
of age. That’s why there have been fewer shortages driving up chicken prices,
Ortega said.But, he said, “the egg industry has
some dominant players, and I think that plays a role here. If you’re an egg
producer that hasn’t had an outbreak in one of your facilities, you’re not
incurring costs—so you are benefiting from those higher egg prices.”Perhaps the bigger problem is that
some companies may not be investing profits from the current crisis in the
precautions that would slow bird flu’s spread and reduce egg-price instability
in the future. Cal-Maine just paid
out big dividends to shareholders this month. Yet those profits do not seem to be going
back into efforts to flu-proof their operations, like building smaller
facilities and hiring more dedicated workers who don’t go from chicken house to
chicken house potentially spreading the virus—measures that would make
outbreaks hurt a lot less. Instead, they seem to be expanding bigger facilities. Egg-laying facilities
can house a million chickens or more, which can create the perfect conditions
for bird flu to spread—and mutate. “When everything is good, everything goes
great and perfect, but when there is a problem, it’s a disaster,” Crespo said.H5N1 actually started on poultry farms in both 1959 and
1996, and intensive food animal production drives
outbreaks forward. Wild birds and other intermediary animals are the spark,
but farms can be the tinder.“Obviously, the data for biosecurity is very broken,”
Crespo said. Right now, we’re pretty good at diagnosing the virus and culling
all chickens in order to stop the spread—but we haven’t yet figured out how to
prevent outbreaks in the first place. Farmers know how to reduce some risks—keeping
birds contained inside, rather than roaming outside, helps; so does washing
equipment like trucks that go between farms. “But there are
still some things we don’t understand fully of this virus… We don’t have the
whole picture.”Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology
and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health,
agreed. “I don’t think we have a very clear sense of what is driving the spread
of this virus,” she said. Are rodents, including mice and rats, helping to
spread bird flu when they get into the feed or facilities? Is the virus being
spread by poultry workers? Right now, there are too many unanswered questions. And that matters when it comes to
biocontainment, or measures to stop the virus’s spread, Nuzzo said: “If we’re
going to be spending money, wouldn’t it be nice to know where we can best apply
those resources to mitigate future costs?” In other words, she said, “how many
billions are we going to keep throwing after this virus without trying to
figure out a way to take this virus off the table as a public health and
agricultural threat?”One option for safeguarding farms against future outbreaks
would be to break them up—creating smaller operations that make outbreaks less
devastating. Farms could also employ more workers and invest in more equipment.
“Rather than have one supervisor, I need five supervisors; rather than have one
tractor, I may need to buy five tractors… so the people and the machines and everything
don’t just cross-contaminate each other.” That’s an expensive proposition that
could eat into the margins of smaller producers—but for companies making the
big bucks right now, it would be a worthwhile investment to keep eggs on our
tables. Another option is vaccines. There are approved vaccines
for use in poultry, and countries like China have used them for years. “I
understand why they don’t want to use vaccines. I get it. It’s expensive. It’s
going to be a hard issue for trade,” Nuzzo said, because eggs from vaccinated
chickens usually can’t be exported. But at this point, the benefits might
outweigh the downsides, she said.Vaccines—for poultry and for people—are
“one of the critical areas that could help you be in a position to be prepared
and to intervene in time before it goes from an epidemic outbreak to a
pandemic,” said Christopher Heaney, associate professor of environmental
health, epidemiology, and international health at the Johns Hopkins University.
“Even at the highest levels of biosecurity, you’re still going to have a
challenge managing vermin and rodents,” Heaney said. “The idea of biosecurity
alone preventing this from evolving, and creating a barrier between external
wild animal populations and the internal environment, is just a challenging one
to be able to put all of our confidence and faith in.”This means that even if producers
do it right, egg prices could stay high, because adding vaccines and producing
eggs in smaller operations with more workers and equipment all costs money.
“The solution is not going to give us a cheaper option for the eggs,” Crespo said. But she
encouraged consumers to think of it a different way: “Why does the egg
have to be so inexpensive when it is such a great source of protein?”These are pressing problems that
will only grow in urgency as the outbreak does. “This virus is not going to go
away. This will become a recurring hazard and a recurring challenge for
consumers unless we figure out a way to sustainably deal with this virus,”
Nuzzo said. “Otherwise, we’re going to continue to throw billions of dollars at
this problem with no sustainable solution in sight.”
Bird flu is sweeping through
egg-laying chickens in the United States at an unprecedented rate. So far in
2025, 30 million
layers, as they’re known, have been culled, close to the 38
million killed throughout all of last year: Nearly 10 percent of the
country’s annual number of egg-layers have been wiped out. But one of the big
questions, as egg prices become a potent political football, is this: Are these
shocking infection rates and cull tallies to blame for skyrocketing prices? Or
is something else going on?Last month, Democratic lawmakers including
Elizabeth Warren, James McGovern, and Cory Booker cast doubt on the idea that highly
pathogenic avian influenza, known as HAPI, alone was to blame for soaring egg
prices, writing in a letter
to the Trump administration that “egg producers and grocery stores may leverage
the current avian flu outbreak as an opportunity to further constrain supply or
hike up egg prices to increase profits.” In the past few days, multiple outlets have reported that the
U.S. Department of Justice is now opening an investigation into egg producers’
practices.Trump administration officials have, meanwhile, offered puzzling
and sometimes contradictory insights. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of
health and human services, recently said
that health agencies will not recommend poultry vaccines. (This recommendation
would typically come through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, over which
Kennedy has no jurisdiction.) “We’ve in fact said, at
the USDA, that they should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run
through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that
are immune to it,” Kennedy said on Fox News recently. Brooke Rollins, USDA secretary, suggested that consumers
concerned about egg prices could try their hand at backyard poultry farming. Few people seem to doubt that bird flu is playing some role
in current prices. Food economists say we’re currently seeing a classic example
of what happens when an inelastic product, or something that people typically buy
no matter the price, becomes scarce and retailers begin bidding against each
other to keep their shelves full. “I’m going to bid more than Aldi or Trader
Joe’s is going to bid, because I have to buy those eggs,” is the way Jada Thompson,
an associate professor in agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas,
described the mindset.It’s also clear that some egg producers have been
devastated by the culls. “I
wouldn’t be surprised that some companies go out of business,” Rocio Crespo, a
professor in poultry health and management at NC State University, told me. Smaller
producers who
have lost their entire flocks aren’t able to benefit from high prices right now.But the producers still able to
sell eggs are experiencing a boom. Cal-Maine Foods, the largest egg producer in the country—and
the only one publishing financial
information, because it’s publicly traded—reported in January that net sales nearly doubled in a year, jumping up to $954.7 million in the quarter ending
November 30, from $523.2 million at the same time the previous year. And that was months ago, before prices went this
high.Warren and her fellow lawmakers are
skeptical for a reason: In December 2023, an Illinois jury found five major egg
companies—Cal-Maine, United Egg Producers, United States Egg Marketers, and
Rose Acre Farms—liable for millions in damages after engaging in price
gouging, where the producers intentionally created the conditions of scarcity
by killing hens early or exporting more eggs to other countries in order to
drive up prices.A Food and Water Watch report released last Wednesday found
that retail egg prices even in places without bird flu outbreaks more than
doubled between January 2022 and January 2023. The Southeast region only reported its
first case this past January, and raised more eggs in recent years than before
the outbreak began, yet still saw the same rise in prices as the rest of the
country.Even at the national level, the idea that bird flu has
constrained supply, the report suggested, doesn’t quite fit: “From April to
December 2023, national retail inventories of eggs exceeded the five-year
average by as much as 12.8 percent. Nevertheless, average egg prices exceeded
the five-year average in each month as well.” In 2023, for
example, despite having no bird flu outbreaks, Cal-Maine’s egg prices soared by
more than 700
percent, and the company awarded dividends to shareholders
totaling $250 million—a 40-fold increase from 2022. (Cal-Maine did not respond
to media inquiries by press time.)Still, other experts say, that’s
hardly proof that something sketchy is going on. In order to know whether
companies are engaging in anything underhanded, “you’re going to need a whole
bunch of proprietary data, which I’m going to guess you don’t have—if you do,
please send my way,” Thompson told me. Otherwise, “nobody will be able to tell
you that answer,” she said. “I can’t tell you that there’s no additional
margins being taken somewhere, but I can tell you that HPAI is having—probably
a very large portion of this is going to be related to supply.” And “unless the
government is setting the price, prices are going to be set by market forces,”
she added.Scarcity is far and away the
clearest reason for current price hikes, David Ortega, a food economist and
professor at Michigan State University, told me. “When you have less supply of
eggs and demand is relatively inelastic, then you can expect a pretty
significant increase in the price.” He cautioned against making a “one-to-one”
comparison, expecting egg prices to rise only by about 10 percent because
that’s how far egg inventory has dropped. “That’s the crux of the question: why
are prices 125% up if supplies are only down seven [percent], right?” Thompson
said.But when inventory drops by any
amount, bidding can go much higher. And because of decontamination needs and
the fact that it takes egg-layers between four and five months to reach
maturity, bird flu can take egg facilities offline for about six months. Chickens
raised for meat, on the other hand, are usually slaughtered around eight weeks
of age. That’s why there have been fewer shortages driving up chicken prices,
Ortega said.But, he said, “the egg industry has
some dominant players, and I think that plays a role here. If you’re an egg
producer that hasn’t had an outbreak in one of your facilities, you’re not
incurring costs—so you are benefiting from those higher egg prices.”Perhaps the bigger problem is that
some companies may not be investing profits from the current crisis in the
precautions that would slow bird flu’s spread and reduce egg-price instability
in the future. Cal-Maine just paid
out big dividends to shareholders this month. Yet those profits do not seem to be going
back into efforts to flu-proof their operations, like building smaller
facilities and hiring more dedicated workers who don’t go from chicken house to
chicken house potentially spreading the virus—measures that would make
outbreaks hurt a lot less. Instead, they seem to be expanding bigger facilities. Egg-laying facilities
can house a million chickens or more, which can create the perfect conditions
for bird flu to spread—and mutate. “When everything is good, everything goes
great and perfect, but when there is a problem, it’s a disaster,” Crespo said.H5N1 actually started on poultry farms in both 1959 and
1996, and intensive food animal production drives
outbreaks forward. Wild birds and other intermediary animals are the spark,
but farms can be the tinder.“Obviously, the data for biosecurity is very broken,”
Crespo said. Right now, we’re pretty good at diagnosing the virus and culling
all chickens in order to stop the spread—but we haven’t yet figured out how to
prevent outbreaks in the first place. Farmers know how to reduce some risks—keeping
birds contained inside, rather than roaming outside, helps; so does washing
equipment like trucks that go between farms. “But there are
still some things we don’t understand fully of this virus… We don’t have the
whole picture.”Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology
and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health,
agreed. “I don’t think we have a very clear sense of what is driving the spread
of this virus,” she said. Are rodents, including mice and rats, helping to
spread bird flu when they get into the feed or facilities? Is the virus being
spread by poultry workers? Right now, there are too many unanswered questions. And that matters when it comes to
biocontainment, or measures to stop the virus’s spread, Nuzzo said: “If we’re
going to be spending money, wouldn’t it be nice to know where we can best apply
those resources to mitigate future costs?” In other words, she said, “how many
billions are we going to keep throwing after this virus without trying to
figure out a way to take this virus off the table as a public health and
agricultural threat?”One option for safeguarding farms against future outbreaks
would be to break them up—creating smaller operations that make outbreaks less
devastating. Farms could also employ more workers and invest in more equipment.
“Rather than have one supervisor, I need five supervisors; rather than have one
tractor, I may need to buy five tractors… so the people and the machines and everything
don’t just cross-contaminate each other.” That’s an expensive proposition that
could eat into the margins of smaller producers—but for companies making the
big bucks right now, it would be a worthwhile investment to keep eggs on our
tables. Another option is vaccines. There are approved vaccines
for use in poultry, and countries like China have used them for years. “I
understand why they don’t want to use vaccines. I get it. It’s expensive. It’s
going to be a hard issue for trade,” Nuzzo said, because eggs from vaccinated
chickens usually can’t be exported. But at this point, the benefits might
outweigh the downsides, she said.Vaccines—for poultry and for people—are
“one of the critical areas that could help you be in a position to be prepared
and to intervene in time before it goes from an epidemic outbreak to a
pandemic,” said Christopher Heaney, associate professor of environmental
health, epidemiology, and international health at the Johns Hopkins University.
“Even at the highest levels of biosecurity, you’re still going to have a
challenge managing vermin and rodents,” Heaney said. “The idea of biosecurity
alone preventing this from evolving, and creating a barrier between external
wild animal populations and the internal environment, is just a challenging one
to be able to put all of our confidence and faith in.”This means that even if producers
do it right, egg prices could stay high, because adding vaccines and producing
eggs in smaller operations with more workers and equipment all costs money.
“The solution is not going to give us a cheaper option for the eggs,” Crespo said. But she
encouraged consumers to think of it a different way: “Why does the egg
have to be so inexpensive when it is such a great source of protein?”These are pressing problems that
will only grow in urgency as the outbreak does. “This virus is not going to go
away. This will become a recurring hazard and a recurring challenge for
consumers unless we figure out a way to sustainably deal with this virus,”
Nuzzo said. “Otherwise, we’re going to continue to throw billions of dollars at
this problem with no sustainable solution in sight.”
