After hitting a record high this year, egg prices are set to rise even further.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a report on Tuesday that it projects that prices will rise 41.1% this year. Just last month, the USDA predicted only a 20% increase.
The rising cost is due to two main factors: steady inflation and a surge in bird flu cases affecting egg-laying hens nationwide. This has led to shortages in grocery stores, with some, including Trader Joe’s, limiting how many cartons customers can purchase.
The USDA said combined retail egg prices surged 13.8% in January after an 8.4% rise in December. The price of a dozen large grade A eggs reached a record $4.95 in January, up over 96% from just $2.52 a year ago, according to data released earlier this month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Here is everything you need to know about rising egg prices:
The primary cause is the shrinking of the nation’s egg-laying hen population due to the ongoing bird flu outbreak.
H5N1 is a strain of bird influenza that was first detected in 1996 in domestic water foul — such as ducks and geese — in Southern China. It is highly-contagious among birds. A new outbreak was first detected in 2020 among wild birds in Europe, which made its way to the U.S. in 2022.
Since then, more than 166 million birds, including commercial poultry, have been infected, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In just the past 30 days, almost 18.9 million cases among U.S. birds were detected.
Whenever a flock is infected it is culled — killed — to stop the spread of the virus. For example, a farm in New York recently made headlines after it was forced to euthanize 100,000 ducks after health officials confirmed the flock was infected with the bird flu.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported this month that the country’s egg production fell 4% in January and the population of all egg-laying poultry fell 5% from last year.
At the same time, overall food prices are on the rise too. The USDA expects prices for all food products to rise 3.4% this year. Grocery store prices are expected to increase by 3.3%.
Just before leaving office, President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be ramping up its bird flu response by awarding $306 million in funding to boost disease surveillance, testing, and monitoring efforts. And this month, the USDA granted a conditional license for a vaccine designed to protect chickens from the virus.
President Donald Trump has also made some efforts at tackling overall rising prices. In an executive order, Trump ordered government agencies to start “pursuing appropriate actions” to lower costs for American families.
He also signed executive orders aimed at increasing oil production and lowering energy costs with the hopes to bring down the cost of all goods.
“Prices are going to come down, but it’s going to take a little bit of time, right?,” Vice President J.D. Vance told CBS’s Face the Nation in January. “Donald Trump has already taken multiple executive actions that are going to lower energy prices, and I do believe that means consumers are going to see lower prices at the pump and at the grocery store.”
It doesn’t look like egg prices will be dropping soon: The spread of the flu would need to stop first and then it would then take months for farms to replenish their egg-laying hen numbers.
Brian Moscogiuri, a vice president of Eggs Unlimited – a California-based wholesaler, told the New York Times it could take the market six months to stabilize.
“We need to see outbreaks of avian influenza stop,” Moscogiuri said, as cited by the newspaper. “We need a period of time when the farms aren’t being impacted and can repopulate their chickens and we need to see demand start to slow down.”
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