A rampant bird flu outbreak has sent egg prices soaring and the dining industry scrambling to catch up – with one Washington, DC-based restaurateur claiming he shells out an extra $20,000 each week.
Steve Salis, founder and chief executive of Catalogue, a restaurant holding company that owns more than a dozen locations across the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia area, said he started to notice his egg costs were piling up in the second week of January.
“I let it go for about two or three weeks,” Salis told The Post, “but then I started saying to myself, ‘Oh my goodness’…I was on track to eat north of a million dollars [this year] and then some.”
The avian flu has forced farmers to cull their flocks across the country, causing shortages that sent egg prices soaring 15.2% in January – the largest monthly increase since 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Shortages have left customers fighting over a few cartons at the grocery store and restaurant owners struggling to contend with higher costs – especially breakfast chains that specialize in egg dishes, like Salis’ Ted’s Bulletin.
In just a few weeks, Salis said he went from paying $32 for a case of eggs to more than $70.
And Ted’s Bulletin, which offers its breakfast menu all day long, serves up at least 25 dishes that contain eggs – requiring up to 500 fresh cases each week.
“When I started seeing in grocery stores that you couldn’t go and buy eggs, and if you did, you were so fortunate like it was like liquid gold…it told me everything I needed to know,” he told The Post.
Salis was born and raised in New Hampshire and started his career in the restaurant industry at 20, when he dropped out of college, moved to New York and worked as a caterer.
With 15 years in the industry under his belt, he decided this year to add a surcharge on his menu for the first time – a 75-cent fee on each menu item that includes eggs.
“You don’t want to start slashing things that make your business important. You don’t want to reduce staff,” Salis said.
Egg costs went from accounting for about 30% of his overall food purchases for Ted’s restaurants to as much as 45% now, Salis said.
Ted’s Bulletin – one of Catalogue’s five restaurant brands – is not the first to resort to an egg surcharge.
Waffle House made headlines earlier this month when it added a 50-cent surcharge per egg to its menus. Denny’s, another large chain that specializes in breakfast dishes, quickly followed suit.
“It’s a bit of a balancing act,” Salis told The Post. “We’ve been juggling a lot for a long time.”
The jump in egg prices is a double whammy for breakfast chains, some of which are still recovering from pandemic-induced inflation, which forced many restaurants to shutter.
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