The nation’s biggest egg producer is raking in profits as shoppers get slammed with stratospheric prices — and it’s partly because the company has been deliberately keeping a lid on supply, a farm advocacy group claims.
Ridgeland, Miss.-based Cal-Maine Foods has taken advantage of the avian flu crisis to “raise prices, amass record profits and consolidate market power,” Farm Action alleged in a Tuesday letter to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice.
While US egg farms have destroyed some 115 million hens over 24 months to stop the spread of bird flu, the largest suppliers are showing “a remarkable unwillingness” to invest in expanding their flocks, according to the letter.
That’s despite the fact that the average price of a dozen grade-A eggs hit a record $4.95 last month, surpassing the previous record of $4.82 in January 2023, according to the latest data from the Department of Labor.
In some New York City supermarkets, the price for a dozen regular eggs has hit or surpassed the $10 mark. Stores offering lower prices, including Trader Joe’s and Costco, have imposed limits on how many customers can buy.
Farm Action, a group backed by smaller farmers to take aim at “corporate monopolies,” claims that leading egg producers are keeping the supply of new egg-laying hens “stagnant” in order to prolong their two year run of record profits.
Cal-Maine – the only major publicly held egg producer, with brands including Land O’ Lakes and Egg-Land’s Best – kept its production stable at approximately 1.1 billion dozen eggs a year from 2021 to 2024, according to the farmer-led nonprofit’s analysis.
During that span, company’s gross profits were up 237% and shot up by 646% from 2021 to 2023.
Instead of increasing their flocks, the five companies have plowed their windfalls into gobbling up their competitors, according to the letter. Cal-Maine Foods acquired six companies in 2023 alone.
The other companies colluding with Cal-Maine are Rose Acre Farms, Daybreak Foods, Hillandale Farms, and Versova Holdings, a spokesperson for Farm Action told The Post.
Cal-Maine did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The US egg-laying flock has yet to return to its pre-epidemic size of around 330 million hens as the egg industry has “failed to meaningfully expand the number of fertilized eggs placed in incubators and the number of chicks hatched,” according to the letter.
Bird flocks recovered much quicker during the last outbreak in 2015, when it took just eight months to get back to a normal number of birds.
During the 2014-2015 bird flu, producers lost and replaced over 35 million hens in less than a year, making a full recovery from the outbreak. This time around, there is no recovery in sight after two years.
In 2023, Cal-Maine three other egg producers were ordered to pay $17.7 million in damages by a federal jury to Kraft Foods, The Kellogg Company, General Mills and Nestle USA, who’d accused the companies of conspiracy to limit the egg supply in the US.
Cal-Maine controls about 20% of the egg market in the US. The company was accused of price fixing by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at the start of the Avian flu in 2022.
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