Egg Prices Soar as Outdated Supply Chains Crack Under Pressure
By Jack Buffington
There may be no kitchen table issue in America more critical than the price of food.
So when the price of eggs rose over 40% from 2024 to 2025, it became a headline news story in Colorado and across the nation.
Public officials and the media blamed high egg prices on bird flu outbreaks and said containing the outbreak in supply chains would lower prices. In early March 2025, egg prices fell in the U.S., but these trends are likely to reverse due to higher seasonal demand during Easter and Passover.
Rising prices and market volatility have led to food costs climbing to 11.4% of Americans’ disposable income, the largest percentage since 1991.
Arresting these rising costs, as I argue in my 2023 book, means reinventing supply chains to address the growing supply, demand, and price volatility that has created uncertainty for consumers since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
I have described global supply chains, and supply chains in the U.S. in particular, as “efficiently broken.” By this, I mean that they aspire to offer low prices from economies of scale but lack sufficient resiliency to create stability.
Without addressing the systemic weaknesses in supply chains, I believe major health and economic disruptions will continue to happen in Colorado, nationally and around the world.
Cage-free eggs
Colorado faces a double whammy where egg prices are concerned.
It’s one of nine states with a cage-free egg mandate, which requires all eggs sold in the state to come from cage-free facilities. The regulation has been shown to increase the price of eggs by as much as 50%.
Over the past two decades, cage-free egg laws have been passed in states as consumers have grown more concerned with the welfare of farm animals. What that means varies from state to state because the term cage-free isn’t regulated by a federal agency. In Colorado, egg-laying hens must be housed in a cage-free system and must have a minimum of 1 square foot of usable floor space per hen.
Colorado is the 28th largest egg producer in the U.S., far behind Midwestern states such as Iowa, Indiana and Ohio, but it has a few large producers such as Morning Fresh Farms, as well as smaller ones such as the Colorado Egg Producers Association, a collection of seven family-owned farms.
Colorado’s cage-free egg law went into effect in January 2025 – around the same time that consumers noticed bare egg shelves at their supermarkets. Many consumers and some elected Republicans in Colorado blamed the cage-free law.
Nevada is pulling back on its cage-free egg mandate to deal with the challenge of unaffordable egg prices.
But cage-free laws are not the main driver of increasing egg prices, as I’ve noted in my research. Like many others, the egg supply chain needs to be reinvented to balance price, scale, resiliency and stability.
Supply chain issues
What is driving up the prices of eggs and other consumer goods is the concentration of producers. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed just how vulnerable prices and supply chains are.
Five years ago this month, when the pandemic started, many products became unavailable and more expensive.
In 2022, a major product recall of Similac led to a baby formula shortage in the U.S. The baby formula market is highly concentrated, with four companies responsible for approximately 90% of the domestic market. A large-scale facility that produced the baby formula was found to have unsanitary conditions and contaminated products. Pulling this one facility offline at the same time the nation was coping with pandemic-related supply chain issues led to the shortage.
Then at the beginning of 2024, supplies of insulin ran short due to production issues at Eli Lilly, one of the three companies responsible for over 90% of the U.S. insulin market.
And in the second half of 2024, hospitals couldn’t get enough IV fluid due to damage caused by Hurricane Helene to a Baxter factory in North Carolina that manufactures approximately 60% of IV fluids in the U.S. This factory had been relocated to North Carolina from Puerto Rico due to the supply impact from Hurricane Maria that damaged the island in 2017.
In all of these cases, the supply chain was easily interrupted due to a reliance on a few large producers. In 2025, bird flu and eggs are just another example of America’s “efficiently broken” supply chain.
Bird flu and cost of eggs
In the U.S., the top five egg producers are responsible for 40% of hens, with Mississippi-based Cal-Maine Foods alone responsible for 13% of total U.S. production.
An average-sized production facility in the U.S. can house 75,000 to 500,000 hens. Large facilities can house over 4 million. The mass production of eggs from these facilities means eggs are, in stable times, cost effective for the American consumer. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, eggs in the U.S. never surpassed $3 a dozen, and it was an affordable food solution compared with processed foods.
But this scale and efficiency comes at the price of resiliency during something like a bird flu outbreak. Larger farms create a higher risk of viral outbreak, which leads to the need for culling millions of birds and a heightened risk of viral replication and mutation.
The solution may increase prices
Policymakers want to reduce the spread of disease at American egg factories to mitigate the spread of bird flu. But these measures are expensive.
Factory farms increase the potential for viruses to spread rapidly and even mutate. Therefore, bird flu is a more serious precursor of supply chain disruption than a hurricane or product recall because it has the potential to create a public health crisis.
One solution to limit the spread of bird flu is to regulate the number of hens allowed in a single facility. This would lead to smaller and more farms across the U.S., but also higher consumer prices.
This solution would mirror other countries such as Canada, where the average facility size is much smaller than in the U.S., and eggs and poultry cost significantly more. That’s why – under the terms of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement – Canada has quota and tariff protection from American companies flooding its market with eggs and poultry that would cost consumers two to three times less.
Yet in March 2025, the price of eggs in Canada is 50% cheaper than eggs in the U.S. because the country has not suffered the same damages from bird flu.
Following Canada’s lead wouldn’t result in egg prices as low as giant factory farms, but it would protect American consumers from the periodic price shocks caused by disease or localized weather events that disrupt supplies.
Despite the threat of a public health crisis, American consumers don’t want to pay more for eggs – and their leaders have promised they won’t have to.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Wall Street Sees Signs That Worst of U.S. Stock Selloff Is Over
(Bloomberg) — Traders battered by one of the fastest U.S. stock slides on record may be poised for a reprieve.
Equity strategists at firms including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, and Evercore ISI are advising clients that the worst of the recent downturn is likely behind them, citing metrics from investor sentiment and positioning to favorable seasonality.
Major American stock indexes bounced back Monday after reports that President Donald Trump plans to take a more targeted approach with the tariffs he will roll out on April 2, easing some concerns that his escalating trade war will fan inflation and stall the economy.
Those worries — along with lingering fears that the artificial intelligence-fueled Big Tech rally had run too far — had knocked stocks down sharply since mid-February, sending the S&P 500 Index into its seventh-fastest 10% drop from a record high in nearly a century and erasing over $5.6 trillion from the index’s market capitalization, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
JPMorgan said the bulk of that came from a cohort of momentum stocks, the 50 names with the strongest price performance in the S&P 500, which had erased two years of gains in three weeks. But the selloff also eased the crowding in the segment that had built up during the previous rally.
“As a result, the risk of another violent unwind should be low in the short term,” JPMorgan strategists led by Dubravko Lakos-Bujas said in a March 21 note to clients.
On Monday, pockets of the market that were hardest hit recently saw the biggest recoveries. A gauge of so-called Magnificent Seven stocks jumped 3.4%. Tesla Inc. soared 12% in the largest one-day gain since Nov. 6, the session directly after Election Day. The broader S&P 500 advanced 1.8%.
Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson joined Lakos-Bujas in striking a more optimistic tone, indicating that seasonal factors, a falling U.S. dollar, Treasury yields, and ultra-pessimistic sentiment and positioning are paving the way for a “tradeable rally in the near term.” And at Evercore ISI, chief equity and quantitative strategist Julian Emanuel said rhetoric on the economy by the Trump administration “has reset the bar such that sentiment is so negative right now.”
“We think the two steps backward portion we lived through is in the process of resolving itself, and you’re likely to get three steps forward toward higher prices,” he said.
The selloff has left Wall Street conflicted about whether the time has come to buy the dip, however, as the market continues to be shadowed by trade-policy uncertainty and concerns that the enthusiasm about artificial intelligence pushed tech valuations too high. While strategists see a period of calm ahead, they’ve largely avoided giving clients a resounding all clear to pile into U.S. equities for now.
That’s in significant part because Trump’s planned announcement of universal, reciprocal trade tariffs next month may again alter investors’ expectations about the economic fallout.
Evercore’s Emanuel said it’s the next catalyst for the market. Morgan Stanley’s Wilson says he’s also watching employment and manufacturing data along with earnings revisions as “signposts for a more durable rally.”
At 22V Research, chief market strategist and president Dennis DeBusschere on Monday said that market internals have improved in a way that suggests the U.S. economy is not moving into a recession. The unusually low investor sentiment — given the still solid economic data — suggests “stronger than normal returns” in the one-, three-, and six-month periods if the impact of tariffs wind up being minor. But like others, he’s waiting for more clarity around the levies to firm up his views.
“Assuming tariffs are not a major headwind to growth, fundamental factors should rebound throughout 2025,” he said. But “our conviction that tariffs will not lead to deeply negative outcomes is low, which is why we will wait until the April 2 announcement to press this longer-term view.”
With assistance from Matt Turner.
Consumer Confidence Measure Plunges to Lowest in 12 Years
Americans continue to sour on the U.S. economic outlook as uncertainty around President Trump’s policies and higher prices weigh on consumer sentiment.
The latest consumer confidence index reading from the Conference Board was 92.9 in March, below the 100.1 seen in February and the lowest level in more than four years. The expectations index, which is based on consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business, and labor market conditions, ticked down to 65.2 from 72.9 and remained below the threshold of 80 — which typically signals recession ahead — for the second straight month.
This marked a 12-year low for the expectations index, which was driven in part by consumers’ expectations of their financial situation hitting its lowest level in more than two years.
“One of the most significant developments that we have seen was a decline in financial situation expectations from consumers,” Yelena Shulyatyeva, Conference Board senior U.S. economist, told Yahoo Finance. “So that seems to suggest that all this uncertainty around economic outlook is really starting to weigh on consumers’ assessment of how they will fare going forward.”
The Conference Board noted in the release that of the five components that contribute to consumer confidence, only the respondents’ assessment of current labor market conditions moved higher in March. Future expectations were particularly dour, with consumers’ inflation expectations rising to 6.2% in March, up from 5.8% in February. For the first time since 2023, consumers turned negative on the stock market outlook, with just 37.4% of respondents expecting stocks to rise over the next year.
Meanwhile, those expecting a lower income in the next 12 months rose to 15.5% from 12.8% in February, marking the highest level of respondents expecting a lower income in the next year since November 2022.
“This data suggests that consumers lack confidence in their job security such that they can ask for higher wages,” Jefferies U.S. economist Tom Simons wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “The direction of travel in this indicator is concerning, but the levels aren’t quite at thresholds that we expect would trigger big shifts in spending behavior.”
Tuesday’s reading is one of several that have shown weakening expectations for the economy among consumers. The growing market fear is that consumers feeling worse about the economic outlook could prompt more cautious spending.
But Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and economists question whether readings in the “soft” survey data like the consumer confidence index will translate to a deterioration in the “hard” economic data like real consumer spending.
“The relationship between survey data and actual economic activity hasn’t been very tight,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a press conference on March 19. “There have been plenty of times where people are saying very downbeat things about the economy and then going out and buying a new car. But we don’t know that that will be the case here. We will be watching very carefully for signs of weakness in the real data.”
For now, economists have largely argued that while the overall growth outlook for the U.S. economy may now be weaker than initially thought coming into the year, there isn’t a clear sign of a significant slowdown.
In a research note to clients on Sunday, Morgan Stanley’s chief global economist wrote that “all the crises about recession” are “probably” overdone. He pointed to January’s decline in retail sales spooking investors, only to then be reversed by a gain in February.
Josh Schafer is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X @_joshschafer.
