Egg Shortages Reported Across the United States as the Holiday Baking Season Begins
Bird-flu cited as the reason for limited supplies. However, experts project shortages will be localized and short-lived.
The holiday season is a time for sugar plums, Christmas cookies, and festive meals.
Eggs are a key ingredient in many of the season’s special recipes, which could be a problem this year. Egg shortages are affecting various parts of the country, causing empty grocery store shelves and rising consumer prices.
The ongoing bird flu outbreak is being blamed.
Egg shelves in some stores have become increasingly bare, with signs warning customers about the severe shortage. Experts say the ongoing bird flu epidemic is significantly affecting egg production, leaving stores struggling to meet demand.
“Right now, it is at a tipping point,” said Aziz Bellarbi-Salah, owner of Brasserie Du Monde, a restaurant in downtown Sacramento. Bellarbi-Salah, who also owns several other local establishments, expressed concern about the rising costs of eggs, which are a key ingredient in many popular dishes, such as eggs benedict, deviled eggs, and omelets.
“We have already started working hard to diversify our sourcing when it comes to the eggs that we are using,” said Bellarbi-Salah. “Costco had organic eggs, and they were 3 and change a dozen rather than $9 or $10 a dozen.”
Legal Insurrection readers know that I keep my cooking and baking to a minimum. However, my son is coming home for the holidays, so I had planned to make eggs for breakfast. Fortunately, I could buy the last dozen from my store…for $8.
And, as I have been following this particular crisis for 2 years, I wasn’t complaining.
The current shortages are the result of poultry infections that began in the fall when the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza/H5N1 virus returned to regions that had been free from the disease for a few months.
“After two months of no outbreaks, we had them recently in Utah, Oregon, California and Washington, and three of those states are exclusively cage-free,” Emily Metz, chief executive and president of the American Egg Board, told CBS MoneyWatch. “Where we are hearing reports of shortages it’s at stores like a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s.”
After a brief respite from bird flu among commercial-egg producers, HPAI struck again starting in mid-October, resulting in the loss of 2.8 million birds. The nation’s egg production fell 2.6% last month from a year ago and is projected to be down 1% this year versus 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service recently said in a monthly report.
The outbreaks, which began in January of 2022, have affected nearly 110 million chickens, turkeys and other birds, including wild, commercial and backyard flocks in 49 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That was the first time HPAI, also known as H5N1, had been detected in the U.S. since 2016.
The shortages are hitting urban pockets particularly hard.
Reports of empty shelves have surfaced in Denver, Miami and New York as recently as this weekend, NBC News reported. In some cases, signs asked shoppers to limit their egg purchases due to “difficulty sourcing.”
Eggless shelves were also reported at some stores in the Chicago area, though the shortages don’t appear to be widespread.
States with mandates for cage-free eggs are being significantly impacted.
A few states, including California, Nevada, Washington and Oregon, have laws requiring all eggs sold in the state to be cage-free. Therefore, the egg shortage is hitting these states particularly hard as grocery stores scramble to source eggs that comply with state laws.
As I live in California, I have plenty to worry about.
Imagine trying to make egg nog without eggs…or brandy. pic.twitter.com/AxZ3JRu0Va
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) December 20, 2024
Poultry industry experts assure consumers the shortages should be localized and short-lived.
Hopefully, all of my Legal Insurrection fans will be able to get every ingredient they need for their holiday meals — including eggs.
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Comments
There’s no such thing as a shortage. There are only price controls.
No. Of course there are such things as shortages.
Price controls are bad and stupid but that doesn’t mean that shortages are a figment of the imagination.
Price clears the market. Everybody who wants one at that price gets one, nobody is left out. That’s what market clearing means.
Uh … no. Actual shortages drive prices up. That is a fact of economics – called “supply and demand”. Just because someone cannot afford something doesn’t mean that there is no shortage in that product.
Secondly, there are things that people need. If you don’t have enough then that is a shortage that has nothing to do with price. For example, drinking water. If you have 100 people and only 1 gallon of drinking water available then that is what any normal person would call a “shortage”. Now, I can imagine your asinine argument would be that 1 person buys the water at the price and 99 people die and no longer need any water, so there is no shortage … but that is not what we call “real life”.
There are shortages. They can come from all manner of causes – price controls being but one source of problems – but they can also come from totally natural phenomena, such as locusts eating fields and the like.
Nevertheless there is a market-clearing price. What you’re seeing is a profit-making opportunity if you can find a source at a lower cost, and in fact that’s part of why there are no shortages.
There is purifying water for drinking (build a fire, desalinate ocean, condensation onto saran wrap over a hole dripping into a bottle, etc.
No money? sell sexual favors.
Not to alarm you, but you may encounter a shortage of buyers for that, especially.
If you are selling (or even clearing the market by paying heftily for) sexual favors, may your eggs be duds. There’s no shortage of dumbasses, whatever price they command.
I bought a dozen eggs at my local Hy-Vee supermarket yesterday. for $3.99 a dozen, and those were the expensive brown, organic, no antibiotic, free range chicken eggs. And I live in Iowa where the bird flue epidemic is supposedly occurring. Something is really wrong about this story.
Do you actually want the expensive brown, organic, no antibiotic, free range chicken eggs? Do you find them to be actually better than the cheap white, inorganic, caged-and-inoculated chicken eggs that I buy? Or was that just what they happened to have?
“Poultry industry experts assure consumers the shortages should be localized and short-lived.”
Did you miss the part where the piece stated this?
Or did you not read past the headline, as usual?
There is a shortage of ginger too. My Mom really wanted gingerbread, and I couldn’t find it anywhere…nor could I find a mix for one unless I wanted to pay almost 30 dollars for 4 boxes of Betty Crocker mix at Amazon. I looked up why, and they say there is a shortage caused by the onset of the rainy season in Peru is contributing to harvesting difficulties as well as the limited supply planted.
Thought experiment: suppose eggs go to $20 a dozen. Poor people come into the supermarket, and a charity gives each $20 so that they can buy eggs. Do they buy eggs? No, they have a better use for $20 than $20 a dozen eggs. That;s what “can’t afford” means. It means they have a better use for the money, not that they don’t have the money.
They buy soda and chips, they can actually get free cheese, eggs , milk and rice at the pantry’s
I volunteer at a pantry, they rarely have eggs.
Say what??
Our eggs have gone up about 50% over the past few months but I pay $6/18 eggs at Walmart. It used to be about $3.50. Back when, they were 10 cents@ before the first giant increases back in 2021/2022.
Still … $8/dozen is highway robbery. Eggs aren’t worth eating, at that price.
We started buying bulk and freezing them. Scramble and freeze, then cook or use in baking later.
Also great as dog food. We’ve got the dogs on a 80% egg, rice, potato, sweet potato, (some meat if we have left overs or old stuff) and 20% kibble. Dog food is getting to be so expensive that the egg gambit is a better option. For the dogs, freezing the mix is great.
this model works great when you buy the big crate- (Sam’s club and sometimes at the restaurant supply stores.).
I buy 10ib chicken quarters amd bake them , debone and mix half and half dog food
10Ibs 5.97$
Was 4 just a year ago
I have 3 spoiled dogs
I buy chicken thighs, dehydrate them to jerky like treats. I also boil them and add broth and small pieces of the meat to dry dogfood.& I do the same for our Egyption Mau cats.
DW shops two local “discount stores” (bang & dent, discontinued, approaching expiration, etc.) One of them has been selling “skirt steak” at 50¢/lb. — way cheaper than even dry dog food. Our dogs don’t care about the sell date, they think they’re in heaven.
This discussion reminds me of the great “seniors reduced to eating pet foods” scare of many years ago. In order to discredit Bush, the DNC controlled media decided to run with that story. But no one bothered to fact check it. Turned out that canned pet foods, ounce per ounce, were much more expensive than people food. The story went away.
my neighbors hens are still molting
so store bought yellow yolk eggs for time being.
$4 /doz cheapest I could buy in Austin
Have they been murdering the chickens for bird flue AGAIN?
So they murdered 3 million
Chickens for pink eye in humans?
Poor chickens
Makes you
Want to
Be a vegetarian
Really
The shelves at the grocery store in NC I shop at are full of eggs at the normal price.
I buy Walmart eggs, boxes of 5 dozen, to make protein supplements for my cats.
I buy eggs from the neighbor. Her chickens roam the yard and eat whatever they want. They eat a lot of grass and vegetation, and bugs. Yolks are deep orange yellow from the chlorophyll. Picked up 4 dozen today, She charges $2.50 a dozen but I usually leave a little more.
Today I also spoke for a lamb from her upcoming lambing season. That will go to the local butcher shop in spring.
Haven’t had a lick of trouble getting any kind of food here.
But then I live in flyover country where everything generally works better. We look out for each other.
Nothing more.
राम राम राम राम राम राम राम राम राम राम राम
We have our own chickens, and get the freshest eggs. Since we moved out of San Antonio and into a small town that permits residents to operate a chicken coop, we bought our flock and started raising them and were delighted when we had our first eggs. Nothing like it! Will tell you that keeping chickens isn’t for everyone, because they are loud and messy, but our kids love them. Unfortunately, we also had our first fresh chicken dinner.
To be precise; any egg shortages are due to compulsory total flock slaughter if bird flu is detected in a flock.
Birds are not dying by the millions from it, although bird flu is a highly pathogenic disease. It is endemic in waterfowl, which spreads the disease to poultry in their droppings
Never mentioned is the fact that commercial flocks, both egg layers and fryers, live in totally enclosed environments and the only pathogens they are exposed to are brought in on the boots of the workers who tend them. Workers who are likely to be low-paid illegals.
Illegals who don’t understand or just don’t care about adhering to a kindergarten-level of biosafety and sanitation.
99% of avian flu in commercial flocks is preventable with the simplest of measures. This is never discussed. Why not?
If this is true, how could it be less economically feasible for commercial producers to allow it than to educate on, require and enforce the simplest of measures?
More hoaxing. Our government is lying. (Big surprise there, right?) They are using the PCR test which test for the presence of genetic material. It does not detect the virus and it does not indicate infection. This is another Manufactured Biological Hysteria Hoax. This is the SAME that they use for the COVID hoax. Is there a virus? Yes. Is it a problem? No. They use amplified PCR tests to show an ignorant public something that triggers hysteria. A population ignorant of biological processes will fall for any. This is another false flag created by big pharma.
I will not comply with illegal mandates.
I started raising chickens last March. I figure my eggs cost ( material and labor) about $100 dozen. Of course now I worry about the hens.. all the time.
Egg production slows down in the winter unless the chickens are in a climate controlled environment. Most chicken houses have heaters but are not fully climate controlled.
I have been preparing to move, so I slaughtered a flock of 54 a few years ago. I started with 8 hens 10 years ago, two weeks later coyotes, racoons, possums had taken all 8. I have a lot of the 6 by 10′ do kennels so the next spring I started again with 20 hens, I bought 2 incubators and started hatching my own. I tried over wintering one year, was feeding them and still buying eggs.
I found it was better to hatch a 100 or so early spring, butchering most males for meat, having enough hens to produce eggs to store for winter use.
Eggs have a long shelf life, they do not need to be refrigerated, lasting 6 months with none going bad and as long as a year with some spoilage.
Wow. I had no idea.
I’m going to have to look into this.
Only if they’re unwashed. All eggs sold commercially in the USA are washed, and once they’re washed they must be fridged. In most European countries eggs are not washed, and therefore they don’t need to be fridged and people don’t.