The calls, texts and emails start coming in before 6 in the morning: restaurants, bakeries and others desperate to find eggs.
Brian Moscogiuri is an egg broker. A vice president for the wholesale company Eggs Unlimited, he works the phone in his home office in Toms River, N.J., until late into the evening, trying to connect hopeful buyers with farms that have eggs to spare.
But as avian influenza has led to egg shortages and record wholesale prices — an average of more than $8 a dozen, up from $2.25 last fall — Mr. Moscogiuri’s job has been less making matches and more providing therapy, he said.
“The buyers are struggling,” Mr. Moscogiuri said. “They’re looking at eggs that cost three or four times the typical amount.”
Egg producers, especially smaller, family-owned farms, are also anxious. Should one of their hens test positive for the H5N1 virus that causes avian flu, their whole flock would have to be killed to prevent the spread. “They can wake up and, potentially, your entire business is wiped out,” Mr. Moscogiuri said.
But there is at least one winner in the current shortage, which began in 2022: the country’s biggest egg producer.
Cal-Maine Foods, which controls about a fifth of the egg market and sells to Walmart and other large retailers, reported that its revenues jumped to $954 million in the quarter that ended in late November from $523 million from the prior year — an increase of 82 percent. The company said those numbers “were primarily driven by an increase in the net average selling price of shell eggs as well as an increase in total dozens sold.”
The company’s net income surged more than 500 percent, to $218 million, from year-earlier levels, thanks to higher prices, the lower cost of feed and acquisitions of other operators. And prices have shot up even more since the company released its quarterly financial statement.
The egg production industry has consolidated over the last three decades. Cal-Maine has acquired more than two dozen companies since 1989. It and four other large producers control roughly half of the egg market in the United States. The others are privately held and don’t make their financials public. The second largest of the group, Rose Acre Farms, has 17 facilities in seven states across the South and Midwest. Another large producer, Daybreak Foods, supplies eggs to McDonald’s, and Hillandale Farms sells in grocery stores under its own name and as a private label brand. (None of the companies responded to requests for interviews.)
The bird flu that hit the United States in 2022 has infected or killed 162 million birds thus far, slashing the number of egg-laying chickens. Cal-Maine has reported outbreaks at two of its farms in the last two years, which resulted in the loss of 2.6 million chickens and young hens.
But as consumers confront empty shelves in their grocery stores and prices soar in some places to over $10 for a dozen eggs, the concentration of egg production in fewer hands is raising concerns, stoked by previous findings. Two years ago, the largest producers were found liable for inflating prices in the 2000s. Now, some lawmakers are calling for federal regulators to investigate the industry.
“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,” a group of Democratic lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, stated in a letter to President Trump last month.
Political Pressure
Ever since the effects of bird flu starting showing up in egg prices, the lowly egg has become a political battering ram. During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump blamed the Biden administration for inflation and promised to bring down prices for consumers. Now, Democrats have turned the tables, asking why the Trump administration isn’t doing more to address egg prices that keep going up.
“Donald Trump promised to lower food prices on ‘Day 1,’” Ms. Warren said in a statement to The New York Times. “Working families need relief now.”
On Feb. 16, Alvaro M. Bedoya, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, took to social media and pressed Andrew Ferguson, Mr. Trump’s new head of the F.T.C., to “pay attention to what’s happening on grocery shelves” and investigate egg industry practices.
“I don’t know what’s happening in the egg industry, but it sure as hell seems we should be looking into it and see if there’s anticompetitive conduct that is hurting consumers,” Mr. Bedoya said in an interview.
Similar pleas from advocacy groups and lawmakers were made to the F.T.C. under the Biden administration, which did not announce an antitrust investigation into egg producers. Mr. Bedoya said a great deal of the agency’s resources at the time were devoted to other antitrust efforts, including scrutiny of the grocery industry.
“That capacity has opened up,” he said, referring to the agency now that its antitrust case against the merger of two giant supermarket chains, Kroger and Albertsons, is over. That case, which went to trial last year, ended with a court order preventing the merger.
Critics also say the egg industry needs a closer look. In a letter sent on Feb. 12 to the F.T.C. and the Justice Department, Farm Action, a group that opposes corporate monopolies in food and agriculture, called on the agencies to look into potential monopolization and anticompetitive coordination in the industry.
“There’s smoke there that suggests there may be a fire underneath,” said Basel Musharbash, the principal attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel, an antitrust law and policy firm, who led the research for Farm Action’s letter. “The incentives are there, the power is there to restrain supply, and it seems like we need the F.T.C. or the D.O.J. to look and tell us if that power is actually being used.”
The group contends that the losses from culling egg-laying chickens has been “relatively modest” in relation to the size of the U.S. egg-laying flock, while producers’ profit margins have soared. According to data from Expana, which tracks the prices of eggs, roughly 15 percent of the country’s egg-laying chickens have been killed in the past four months, while wholesale egg prices in the same period have risen 255 percent.
The dynamics of pricing, however, are not straightforward, said Jada Thompson, an associate professor of agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas. “If 15 percent of eggs are out of the system, prices should go up 15 percent, right? But if I’m a baker and I have to make bread for my bread-baking business, I still have to have eggs,” she said. “I’m going to outbid you to get my eggs.”
The egg industry said the bird flu had been devastating to farmers who had lost birds to the virus. At the same time, consumer demand for eggs has been up year over year for 23 consecutive months.
“These two forces combined — tight supply and high demand — are directly causing the spike in wholesale prices we’ve seen recently, said Emily Metz, the president and chief executive of the American Egg Board, in an emailed statement. “The volatility we’ve been seeing in egg prices reflects many factors, most of which are outside the control of an egg farmer.”
A spokesman for the F.T.C. declined to comment on whether the agency was considering opening an investigation. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department confirmed that the antitrust division had received Farm Action’s letter, but declined to comment further.
A Price-Fixing Case
The egg production industry has faced scrutiny over its pricing practices in the past. In 2011, major food companies, including Kraft and General Mills, sued the biggest egg producers and industry trade groups, claiming that they had colluded to reduce the supply of eggs in order to increase the price.
Among the documents cited in their complaint was one sent in 2001 by the leading egg operators to members of the United Egg Producers, a trade group, that stated: “There should be a core segment of the industry that is willing to reduce egg supply in order to achieve profitable egg prices.”
That year, the trade group urged members to adopt a 5 percent flock reduction, estimating that constricting flocks would boost producers’ profits, the complaint states.
Other efforts followed, including a mandate that all United Egg Producers members follow guidelines that one dissenting farm operator argued “may be seen as an intentional effort to reduce supply and increase prices,” according to the complaint.
The price-fixing case filed in 2011 went to a jury, which in 2023 found that the egg producers had unlawfully inflated prices. The producers were told to pay $17.7 million in damages, a figure that under antitrust law was tripled to $53 million. The egg producers can appeal the verdict sometime this year, after post-trial motions are resolved. In a news release after the verdict, Cal-Maine said it was disappointed with the overall decision and was assessing its options for an appeal.
Neither Cal-Maine nor United Egg Producers responded to emails seeking comment.
In 2020, Attorney General Letitia James of New York accused Hillandale Farms of gouging customers with high prices during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. That case was resolved the next year when the company agreed to obey New York’s anti-price-gouging law and donate one million eggs to food banks. The Texas attorney general similarly accused Cal-Maine in 2020 of raising egg prices by 300 percent. The case is still open.
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