A year ago, empty egg shelves in grocery stores were a symbol of stubborn food inflation. Shoppers paid record prices, scrambling to beat per-customer limits and stocking up whenever cartons appeared.
Today, the picture has flipped — and while that’s good news for U.S. consumers, egg farmers are feeling the whiplash.
After ramping up production to meet last year’s frenzied demand and hedge against bird flu losses, US producers now face a glut. Consumer prices have fallen to their lowest levels in two years, squeezing farm margins and pushing some operators below breakeven.
Americans on average paid $2.577 for a dozen large grade A eggs in January, a 59% drop from last March’s record high of $6.227, when avian influenza outbreaks decimated flocks and sent prices soaring. The sharp correction reflects a rapid effort to expand the number of hens to offset the risk of avian influenza, as producers bet tight markets would persist.
Instead, supply has overtaken demand.
“We had farmers that worked really hard to make sure that they have extra hens on hand,” said Emily Metz, president of the American Egg Board. “As a result, we have a very strong supply right now of eggs. That’s why the market is where it is.”
There were 309 million layer hens producing table eggs as of Jan. 1, the most since December 2024, according to US Department of Agriculture data. Egg companies riding the wave of higher prices invested to help farmers expand output, while the Trump administration — under pressure to tame grocery inflation — boosted imports to an estimated 122.5 million dozen eggs in 2025, more than four times year-earlier levels.
That’s sent prices plummeting. Wholesale egg prices, which usually are passed down to the retail level after a lag, at one point in January reached the lowest level since 2017. The USDA forecasts eggs this year averaging $1.25 a dozen, down 67% from the prior year.
Metz said many producers are now operating below breakeven, and prices are likely to remain under pressure given “a lot of supply, and more supply coming on board.”
The financial strain is already being felt at top US shell egg producer Cal-Maine Foods Inc. The company in January reported a 19% drop in quarterly net sales from a year earlier, led by a 28% drop in shell egg sales. The company also noted a jump in the size of breeder flocks as well as chicks.
The avian influenza outbreak which began in 2022, meanwhile, is still lingering but has had a much smaller impact. About 7.8 million commercial table egg layers have been affected from the start of the year to Feb. 19, compared to nearly 27 million in the same time period in 2025 and 42 million total that year, according to the USDA.
Even so, the disease’s lingering presence has made it harder for producers to plan. Farmers decide the size of their flocks as much as 18 months in advance, which means adjusting from the current oversupply will also take time, according to Jada Thompson, an associate professor of agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas.
“There’s a fine line by trying to predict as well as you can what you expect the HPAI cases to be and what they actually end up being,” Thompson said. “And I think that this was potentially a miss.”
© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.