Slate recently had an article that questioned high egg prices.
https://slate.com/business/2025/04/egg-prices-justice-department-investigation.html
You are probably familiar with the story going around about the egg shortage: The United States is in the midst of an outbreak of the highly contagious avian flu. Millions of hens across the country have been wiped out, greatly curtailing the number of eggs in the supply chain. That’s what led to the $12 cartons, totally barren egg sections at the grocery store, surcharges applied to the omelets at Waffle House, and—if we’re being honest—the reelection of Donald Trump under a storm of consumer outrage.
That all makes sense on one level, but Angela Huffman, head of Farm Action—a nonprofit that campaigns against the corporatization of the food system—believes there’s something fishier going on. Maybe, she said, the avian flu is an easy scapegoat for what’s really happening. Maybe the nation’s largest egg producers are using this opportunity to turn a fortune off of breakfast. So Huffman, and her organization, started investigating.
“We had noticed that egg prices had gone up, but at the same time, the largest producers had their profits going up drastically,” Huffman told me. “We thought, OK, if they just needed to raise prices to account for the losses of their hens due to the flu, why are they making five times more money?’ That was really odd to us.”
According to Farm Action’s research, there is evidence that the avian flu’s impact on egg production hasn’t been quite as pervasive as consumers might think. Despite the wipeout infestations and mass euthanizing, Farm Action alleges the size of egg-laying flocks in 2025 are, on average, only about 5 percent smaller, on a month-to-month basis, than they were in 2021.
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