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egg prices
Under Trump, Egg Prices Smash Record for Third Straight Month
"The only egg prices Donald Trump is lowering," quipped the DNC chair, "is our nest eggs."
Apr 10, 2025
For the third straight month, U.S retail egg prices have hit a record high, despite falling wholesale prices, no bird flu outbreaks, and President Donald Trump's campaign promises—and recent misleading claims.
On Thursday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index (CPI) reported the average retail cost of a dozen eggs rose from $5.90 in February to $6.23 last month.
Egg prices continue to increase despite bird flu outbreak slowing finance.yahoo.com/news/egg-pri...
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— Yahoo Finance (@yahoofinance.com) April 10, 2025 at 6:22 AM
Earlier this week, Trump claimed that "eggs are down 79%" due to his administration's work, a possible reference to the wholesale price, which does not reflect retail cost due to the role that profit-hungry industrial producers and grocery cartels play in inflating prices.
Trump also said that egg prices "are going down more," a statement that contradicts not only recent trends but also his own administration's Food Price Outlook, which forecasts a 57.6% increase in egg prices for 2025, with a prediction interval of 31.1%-91.5%.
Recent record egg prices have largely been driven by an avian flu epidemic that has forced farmers to cull over 166 million birds, most of them egg-laying hens. However, no farms are currently reporting any bird flu outbreaks.
On Tuesday, Cal-Maine Foods, the nation's largest egg producer, announced quarterly profits of $509 million, more than triple its gains from a year ago. The Mississippi-based company, which produces around 20% of U.S. eggs, also enjoyed a more than 600% increase in gross profits between fiscal years 2021-23, according to the consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch (FWW).
Yet even as its profits soared, Cal-Maine still took $42 million in federal compensation for losses due to bird flu.
The top five egg producers own roughly half of all U.S. laying hens. The biggest of those corporations is Cal-Maine, which just announced quarterly profits of $509 million — more than 3x what it made a year ago. Corporate concentration + bird flu = a price-hiking free for all.
— Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social) April 9, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Last month, the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division launched an investigation of alleged price-fixing by the nation's largest egg producers, including Cal-Maine, which isn't even the largest recipient of avian flu-related government assistance. Versova, which operates farms in Iowa and Ohio, has been allotted more than $107 million in federal bird flu relief, The Washington Postreported Wednesday. Hillandale Farms, a Pennsylvania-based company sold last month to Global Eggs, received $53 million in avian flu-related subsidies.
"For those companies to be bailed out and then turn around and set exploitative prices, it just adds insult to injury for consumers," Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, told the Post. "Absolutely, it's unfair."
FWW research director Amanda Starbuck took aim at the corporate food system, saying Thursday that "the industry is proving itself effective at extracting enormous profits out of American consumers."
"We are all paying for it—at the store, with food shortages, and with the growing threat of the next pandemic," she continued.
"Restoring sanity to the grocery aisle will require immediate action to transform our food system," Starbuck added. "To lower egg prices, the Trump administration must take on the food monopolies, hasten and prioritize its investigation into corporate price fixing, and stop the spread of factory farms."
The fresh CPI figures weren't all bad news, as the index saw its first decline in five years, falling 0.1% mainly on the strength of lower oil prices. The 12-month increase in consumer prices also slowed from 2.8% to 2.4%.
However, the mildly positive CPI news was overshadowed by the economic uncertainty caused by Trump's mercurial global trade war, including a ramped-up 145% tariff on imports from China, one of the top U.S. trading partners, and ongoing stock market chaos.
"The only egg prices Donald Trump is lowering," Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin quipped earlier this week, "is our nest eggs."
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The Real Reason for Soaring Egg Prices? Gouging by the 'Rotten Egg Oligarchy'
A new Food & Water Watch report details how "corporations use the worsening bird flu crisis to jack up egg prices, even as their own factory farms fuel the spread of disease."
Mar 04, 2025
The nation's largest egg producers would have American consumers believe that avian flu and inflation are behind soaring prices, but a report published Tuesday shows corporate price gouging is the real culprit driving the record cost of the dietary staple.
The fourth installment of Food & Water Watch's (FWW) Economic Cost of Food Monopolies series—titled The Rotten Egg Oligarchy—reports that the average price of a dozen eggs in the United States hit an all-time high of $4.95 in January 2025. That's more than two-and-a-half times the average price from three years ago.
"While egg prices spiral out of reach, making eggs a luxury item, Big Ag is profiting hand over fist," FWW research director Amanda Starbuck said in a statement. "But make no mistake—today's high prices are built on a foundation of corporate price gouging. Our research shows how corporations use the worsening bird flu crisis to jack up egg prices, even as their own factory farms fuel the spread of disease."
FWW found that "egg prices were already rising before the current [avian flu] outbreak hit U.S. commercial poultry flocks in February 2022, and have never returned to pre-outbreak levels."
Furthermore, "egg price spikes hit regions that were bird flu-free until recently," the report states. "The U.S. Southeast remained free of bird flu in its table egg flocks until January 2025, and actually increased egg production in 2022 and 2023 over 2021 levels. Nevertheless, retail egg prices in the Southeast rose alongside January 2023's national price spikes."
"The corporate food system is to blame for exacerbating the scale of the outbreak as well as the high cost of eggs," the publication continues. "Factory farms are virus incubators, with the movement of animals, machines, and workers between operations helping to spread the virus."
"Meanwhile, just a handful of companies produce the majority of our eggs, giving them outsized control over the prices paid by retailers, who often pass on rising costs to consumers," the paper adds. "This highly consolidated food system also enables companies to leverage a temporary shortage in one region to raise prices across the entire country."
Cal-Maine, the nation's top egg producer, enjoyed a more than 600% increase in gross profits between fiscal years 2021-23, according to FWW. The Mississippi-based company did not suffer any avian flu outbreaks in fiscal year 2023, during which it sold more eggs than during the previous two years. Yet it still sold conventional eggs at nearly three times the price as in 2021, amounting to over $1 billion in windfall profits. Meanwhile Cal-Maine paid shareholders dividends totaling $250 million in 2023, 40 times more during the previous fiscal year.
The report highlights how factory farming creates ideal conditions for the spread of avian flu, a single case of which requires the extermination of the entire flock at the affected facility, under federal regulations.
"These impacts cannot be understated," FWW stressed. "Today's average factory egg farm confines over 800,000 birds, with some operations confining several million. This magnifies the scale of animal suffering and death, as well as the enormous environmental and safety burden of disposing of a million or more infected bird carcasses."
Citing U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures, The Guardianreported Tuesday that more than 54 million birds have been affected in the past three months alone.
Egg producers know precisely how the supply-and-demand implications of these outbreaks and subsequent culls can boost their bottom lines. Meanwhile, they play a dangerous game as epidemiologists widely view a potential avian flu mutation that can be transmitted from birds to humans as the next major pandemic threat—one that's exacerbated by the Trump administration's withdrawal from the World Health Organization and cuts to federal agencies focused on averting the next pandemic.
"We cannot afford to place our food system in the hands of a few corporations that put corporate profit above all else."
So far, 70 avian flu cases—one of them fatal—have been reported in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, under Trump, the CDC has stopped publishing regular reports on its avian flu response plans and activities. The USDA, meanwhile, said it "accidentally" terminated staffers working on avian flu response during the firing flurry under Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. The agency is scrambling to reverse the move.
"We cannot afford to place our food system in the hands of a few corporations that put corporate profit above all else," the FWW report argues. "Nor can we allow the factory farm system to continue polluting our environment and serving as the breeding ground for the next human pandemic."
"We need to enforce our nation's antitrust laws to go after corporate price fixing and collusion," the publication adds. "We also need a national ban on new and expanding factory farms, while transitioning to smaller, regional food systems that are more resilient to disruptions."
That is highly unlikely under Trump, whose policies—from taxation to regulation and beyond—have overwhelmingly favored the ultrawealthy and corporations over working Americans. Meanwhile, one of the president's signature campaign promises, to lower food prices "on day one," has evaporated amid ever-rising consumer costs.
According to the USDA's latest Food Price Outlook, overall food prices are projected to rise 3.4% in 2025. Eggs, however, are forecast to soar a staggering 41.1% this year—and possibly by as much as 74.9%.
"If President Trump has any interest in fulfilling his campaign pledge to lower food prices," Starbuck stressed, "he must begin by taking on the food monopolies exploiting pandemic threat for profit."
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Trump FTC Urged to Probe Egg Giants Reaping 'Dramatic' Profits by Keeping Prices High
"Evidence indicates that by not increasing their supply, the five dominant egg firms are forcing prices to stay high while reporting dramatic profit increases and level sales," according to the group Farm Action.
Feb 12, 2025
An advocacy group dedicated to fighting corporate agriculture monopolies on Wednesday urged federal antitrust enforcers to take action against egg producers that the group accuses of taking advantage of the bird flu crisis in order to raise prices, inflate their profits, and consolidate their market power.
What's more, the slow recovery of "flock size"—the total number of egg-laying hens—"despite historically high prices, further suggests coordinated efforts to restrict supply and sustain inflated prices" that warrants investigation, according to a letter sent by Farm Action president Angela Huffman to Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson and Acting Assistant Attorney General Omeed Assefi, who has been tapped to temporarily lead the DOJ antitrust division.
The letter, which invokes the behavior of "dominant egg producers," largely provides data on one company, Cal-Maine Foods, the biggest producer and marketer of shell eggs in the country.
Separately, Democratic voices are urging the Trump administration to take action around corporate conduct as it relates to food prices. FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, a Biden appointee, has also urged Ferguson to open an investigation into egg production and marketing practices—pointing to a 2023 request from Farm Action to the FTC to investigate potential antitrust violations in the egg industry.
And last week Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote that she had sent President Donald Trump a list of ways he "can use his executive authority to tackle high food costs by focusing on corporate profiteering."
Egg prices have risen starting in 2022, coinciding with the arrival of bird flu in the United States, and are likely to keep rising in 2025.
The wholesale price of "Grade-A, Large, White, Shell Eggs" rose from $0.50-$1.30 per dozen in 2021 to $1.50-$5.00 per dozen in 2022, and then eased in 2023 before climbing up again in 2024. As of January 2025, the national index of weekly prices for that same type of eggs was up to $6.00-$8.00 per dozen, according to Farm Action.
"The previous all-time high [for wholesale prices] was late December 2022 heading into Christmas, when we touched $5.46 per dozen," Ryan Hojnowski, a market reporter at Expana, wrote in an e-mail to CNBC. "Of course we have blown way past that this time."
Retail prices have also increased. Retail prices for large, Grade-A eggs reached an average of $4.25 per dozen in December 2022 after never reaching above $3 a dozen in the 2010s. Retail prices declined in 2023 and then rose again throughout 2024, reaching $4.15 per dozen in December of last year.
Farm Action argues that while bird flu has been cited as the main driver for rising egg prices, its actual impact on production has been minimal. According to the letter, bird flu has forced the culling of roughly 115 million egg-laying chickens, but the impact of these losses on the total size of the U.S. supply of egg-laying flock has been "relatively modest." Huffman wrote that this culling has caused egg production to drop from 8.1 billion eggs per month in 2021 to 7.75 billion eggs per month at the end of 2024.
But crucially, according to the letter, per capita production of eggs has not been below per capita consumption of eggs in any year between 2022 and the present—while the total value of egg production has risen from $8.8 billion in 2021 to $17.9 billion in 2023.
Cal-Maine specifically has seen its profits soar. The company tallied gross profits of $179.6 million in fiscal year 2020, but the producer reported $1.2 billion and $541.6 million in gross profits in fiscal year 2023 and 2024, respectively, according to the letter. Between fiscal year 2020 and fiscal year 2024, sale levels have remained fairly consistent, wrote Huffman.
"Evidence indicates that by not increasing their supply, the five dominant egg firms are forcing prices to stay high while reporting dramatic profit increases and level sales. These same firms are then using their increased profits to acquire their competition, further driving market consolidation instead of investing in replenishing or expanding their flocks," Farm Action wrote in a statement on Wednesday.
As evidence, they cite a number of mergers that took place in the industry in 2023, and point to the fact that the top five egg producers' share of the "U.S. layer hen flock" increased from 37% to 46% between 2023 and 2025.
"There appears to be a remarkable unwillingness among large egg producers to invest in the internal reconstruction or expansion of their egg-laying flocks in response to persistently high prices," wrote Huffman, which she contrasts with the quicker flock recovery that took place during the first bird flu outbreak in 2014-2015.
The "lagging recovery" and "the fact that egg producers are showing unusual discipline in their pricing and output decisions" indicates that market forces are not "operating as they should be." The letter suggests a few factors that may contribute to the lack of competition.
The group is urging the two agencies to launch investigations, specifically encouraging the FTC to launch an investigation into pricing and production practices of dominant egg producers and their hatchery suppliers to make sure the market is "truly free and fair."
This is far from the first time that the food and grocery industry has been accused of inappropriately raising prices.
In August 2024, a top executive at the supermarket chain Kroger even admitted under questioning from a Federal Trade Commission attorney that the grocery chain raised its egg and milk prices above the rate of inflation.
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