Cost of Eggs: Why It Spiked Twice (And Fell)

The cost of eggs became the number everybody could recite. Not the CPI, not the shelter index, not real average hourly earnings. A dozen eggs, because the sign hangs at eye level and the number changed fast enough to argue about.

Eggs are worth studying for a reason that has nothing to do with breakfast. They are the control group.

What actually drove the cost of eggs up?

Dead birds. Tens of millions of them.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza arrived in U.S. commercial flocks in early 2022 and kept returning. USDA has tracked the culling of more than 100 million birds across successive waves. When a single barn tests positive, the entire flock is destroyed, and a commercial layer house holds a million hens or more. Replacing them takes roughly five months, because a pullet has to reach laying age.

So supply fell in steps and recovered in steps. The price did the same thing.

Two spikes, two retreats. Read that shape carefully, because the rest of the grocery store does not make it.

Eggs move that cleanly because almost nothing sits between the barn and the carton. No recipe to reformulate with a cheaper filler, no five-year supplier contract to absorb the shock, no second ingredient to substitute. When the laying flock shrinks by a tenth, the shelf finds out in weeks. A box of cereal passes through four or five firms who each decide whether to eat a cost increase or pass it on, and you never see a single one of those decisions.

Why does the shape of the egg spike matter so much?

A real shortage looks like a mountain. A price reset looks like a stair.

Eggs produced a mountain. The constraint was physical, identifiable and temporary: fewer hens, fewer eggs, higher price, then flocks rebuilt and the price came down. Twice.

Now compare that to the cart around it. BLS data puts food-at-home prices roughly 25% above their 2019 level, and that increase has not reversed. No mountain, no retreat, just a step up to a new floor and a slow climb from there. Whatever moved the rest of the store was not a hen shortage, and it has not cleared.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; U.S. Department of Labor.

We break the difference apart in why groceries are so expensive and in the grocery price data itself. The pattern holds across categories.

Was it just bird flu, or was something else happening?

Both questions have live answers, and federal investigators picked up the second one.

Cal-Maine Foods, the largest egg producer in the country, disclosed in a 2025 securities filing that the Justice Department's Antitrust Division had opened an inquiry into egg pricing. Cal-Maine's annual profit rose several times over during the first spike, per its own SEC filings. A separate federal jury verdict in 2023 found that Cal-Maine and other producers had conspired to restrict the egg supply in the 2000s, in a case brought by food manufacturers.

None of that proves the 2022 and 2025 spikes were manufactured. Avian influenza was real, the culls were real, and the supply loss was measurable. What the investigations test is a narrower question: when a genuine shortage hands a concentrated industry cover, does the price go higher than the shortage alone would justify?

That question sits at the center of the greedflation argument, and eggs are the cleanest place to ask it.

Who got hit hardest by the cost of eggs?

The households that eat eggs because eggs are cheap.

Eggs earned their place in the low-income food budget by being the most protein per dollar in the store. When the price triples, the substitute is not steak. It is a worse nutritional outcome at the same cost, or the same nutrition at a cost the budget cannot carry. Roughly 41 million people receive SNAP benefits (USDA), and SNAP allotments are set against a USDA food plan that does not reprice in real time.

Meanwhile the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009 (U.S. Department of Labor). At $7.25, a $6 carton is 50 minutes of work before payroll taxes. At $2, it was 17 minutes. The egg price fell back. The wage never moved at all, which is the argument we run through in food prices vs. wages.

What should the egg spike teach you about every other price?

Ask for the mountain.

When a company explains a price increase by pointing at a cost shock, the honest test is whether the price comes back when the shock clears. Eggs passed that test. Diesel passed it. Lumber passed it. Most of the grocery store did not, and neither did rent, insurance or new cars.

Four processors handle roughly 80% of U.S. beef (USDA). The four largest grocery retailers hold about a third of sales (USDA ERS). At those choke points, an upstream cost increase moves to the shelf in full, and an upstream cost decrease is a margin decision. The FTC's 2024 grocery supply chain report found large retailers' revenue relative to total costs rose above pre-pandemic levels.

Apply the mountain test to the rest of your receipt and the sorting happens fast. Gasoline fell when crude fell. Beef stayed up when cattle prices softened. Rent has not declined as a national average in living memory. Three markets, three structures, three different answers to the same question about whether a price ever comes back, and we map the whole stack in why everything is so expensive.

The cost of eggs went up because a virus killed the hens, and it came down because the hens came back. That is what a market correcting looks like, and it is the exception. Everywhere else in the store, the shock cleared and the price stayed, which tells you the price was never really about the shock. The receipt keeps climbing against a wage floor Congress last touched in 2009. The same arithmetic runs through every category we track.