There could also be no kitchen desk factor in The united states extra important than the cost of meals.
Public officers and the media blamed prime egg costs on fowl flu outbreaks and stated containing the outbreak in provide chains would decrease costs. In early March 2025, egg costs fell within the U.S., however those tendencies are more likely to opposite because of upper seasonal call for throughout Easter and Passover.
Emerging costs and marketplace volatility have ended in meals prices mountaineering to 11.4% of American’s disposable source of revenue, the biggest share since 1991.
Arresting those emerging prices, as I argue in my 2023 e book, method reinventing provide chains to deal with the rising provide, call for and value volatility that has created uncertainty for shoppers because the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
I’ve described international provide chains, and provide chains within the U.S. specifically, as “efficiently broken.” By way of this I imply that they aspire to provide low costs from economies of scale however lack enough resiliency to create steadiness.
With out addressing the systemic weaknesses in provide chains, I consider main well being and financial disruptions will proceed to occur in Colorado, nationally and world wide.
Cage-free eggs
Colorado faces a double whammy the place egg costs are involved.
It’s certainly one of 9 states with a cage-free egg mandate, which calls for all eggs offered within the state to come back from cage-free amenities. The law has been proven to extend the cost of eggs by means of up to 50%.
Over the last twenty years, cage-free egg regulations were handed in states as shoppers have grown extra focused on the welfare of livestock. What that suggests varies from state to state for the reason that time period cage-free isn’t regulated by means of a federal company. In Colorado, egg-laying hens will have to be housed in a cage-free device and will have to have at least 1 sq. foot of usable ground area in keeping with rooster.
Colorado is the twenty eighth biggest egg manufacturer within the U.S., some distance in the back of Midwestern states equivalent to Iowa, Indiana and Ohio, however it has a couple of massive manufacturers equivalent to Morning Recent Farms, in addition to smaller ones such because the Colorado Egg Manufacturers Affiliation, a selection of seven family-owned farms.
Colorado’s cage-free egg legislation went into impact in January 2025 – round the similar time that customers spotted naked egg cabinets at their supermarkets. Many shoppers and a few elected Republicans in Colorado blamed the cage-free legislation.
Nevada is pulling again on its cage-free egg mandate to care for the problem of unaffordable egg costs.
However cage-free regulations don’t seem to be the principle driving force of accelerating egg costs, as I’ve famous in my analysis. Like many others, the egg provide chain must be reinvented to steadiness worth, scale, resiliency and steadiness.
Provide chain problems
What’s using up the costs of eggs and different client items is the focus of manufacturers. The COVID-19 pandemic printed simply how prone costs and provide chains are.
5 years in the past this month, when the pandemic began, many merchandise was unavailable and costlier.
In 2022, a big product recall of Similac ended in a child components scarcity within the U.S. The newborn components marketplace is very concentrated, with 4 corporations accountable for roughly 90% of the home marketplace. A big-scale facility that produced the child components was once discovered to have unsanitary prerequisites and infected merchandise. Pulling this one facility offline on the similar time the country was once dealing with pandemic-related provide chain problems ended in the lack.
Provide chain problems ended in a U.S. scarcity of child components in 2022.
Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Common Pictures Team by the use of Getty Pictures
Then firstly of 2024, provides of insulin ran quick because of manufacturing problems at Eli Lilly, one of the vital 3 corporations accountable for over 90% of the U.S. insulin marketplace.
And in the second one part of 2024, hospitals couldn’t get sufficient IV fluid because of harm brought about by means of Typhoon Helene to a Baxter manufacturing facility in North Carolina that manufactures roughly 60% of IV fluids within the U.S. This manufacturing facility have been relocated to North Carolina from Puerto Rico because of the provision affect from Typhoon Maria that broken the island in 2017.
In all of those circumstances, the provision chain was once simply interrupted because of a reliance on a couple of massive manufacturers. In 2025, fowl flu and eggs are simply every other instance of The united states’s “efficiently broken” provide chain.
Chicken flu and value of eggs
Within the U.S., the highest 5 egg manufacturers are accountable for 40% of hens, with Mississippi-based Cal-Maine Meals by myself accountable for 13% of overall U.S. manufacturing.
A mean-sized manufacturing facility within the U.S. can area 75,000 to 500,000 hens. Massive amenities can area over 4 million. The mass manufacturing of eggs from those amenities method eggs are, in solid instances, value efficient for the American client. Previous to the COVID-19 pandemic, eggs within the U.S. by no means surpassed $3 a dozen, and it was once an reasonably priced meals answer when put next with processed meals.
However this scale and potency comes at the cost of resiliency throughout one thing like a fowl flu outbreak. Greater farms create a better chance of viral outbreak, which results in the desire for culling thousands and thousands of birds and a heightened chance of viral replication and mutation.
The answer would possibly building up costs
Policymakers need to cut back the unfold of illness at American egg factories to mitigate the unfold of fowl flu. However those measures are dear.
Manufacturing unit farms building up the possibility of viruses to unfold swiftly or even mutate. Due to this fact, fowl flu is a extra critical precursor of provide chain disruption than a typhoon or product recall as it has the possible to create a public well being disaster.
One method to prohibit the unfold of fowl flu is to keep watch over the choice of hens allowed in one facility. This is able to result in smaller and extra farms around the U.S., but in addition upper client costs.
This answer would reflect different nations equivalent to Canada, the place the common facility measurement is way smaller than within the U.S. and eggs and poultry value considerably extra. That’s why – underneath the phrases of the United States-Mexico-Canada Settlement – Canada has quota and tariff coverage from American corporations flooding its marketplace with eggs and poultry that will value shoppers two to 3 instances much less.
But in March 2025, the cost of eggs in Canada is 50% inexpensive than eggs within the U.S. for the reason that nation has no longer suffered the similar damages from fowl flu.
Regardless of the specter of a public well being disaster, American shoppers don’t need to pay extra for eggs – and their leaders have promised they gained’t need to.
