Advocacy group claims that record egg prices are the result of illegal collusion among vertically integrated companies

Eggs for sale in Glenview, Ill., Jan. 10 (Associated Press photo by Nam Y. Huh)

Why are eggs more expensive than ever? It's not inflation or bird flu, "as claimed by egg companies, but by price collusion among the nation’s top egg producers," an advocacy organization claims in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, Claire Carlson of The Daily Yonder reports.

Farm Action's letter said, “The real culprit behind this 138% hike in the price of a carton of eggs appears to be a collusive scheme among industry leaders to turn inflationary conditions and an avian flu outbreak into an opportunity to extract egregious profits reaching as high as 40%.”

Carlson notes, "Egg production has become a more vertically integrated industry over the past 45 years, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, a USDA-funded program based at Iowa State University. . . . The largest egg producer in the United States, Cal-Maine Foods, has come to dominate the egg industry through the acquisition of other egg farms across the country, according to their website. . . . Cal-Maine’s gross profit jumped 10-fold from one 26-week period in 2021 to the same period in 2022, according to the company’s most recent quarterly financial statement."

The outbreak of avian flu was the second in seven years. The one in 2015 "was deadlier but did not produce price spikes as high as those seen in 2022," Carlson reports.

Sarah Carden, senior policy advocate at Farm Action, told Carlson, “We see big agriculture controlling this narrative about avian flu and supply chain issues, but when you block out all that noise and just look at the numbers… there’s not a substantial decrease in supply.” The American Egg Board told Carlson, “Eggs are bought and sold on the commodity market, where farmers don’t set the price of eggs – the market does.”