The Great Egg Fleece: A Cartel, Not a Virus

In late 2024 and early 2025 Americans paid record prices for a dozen eggs — $6 and up, with empty shelves, buying limits, and restaurant surcharges. The story you were told was bird flu. The fuller story is a cartelized market that used a crisis as cover. This is the enshittification of the American breakfast.

The bird flu story

The avian flu part is real. H5N1 began hammering U.S. flocks in early 2022 and grew into the largest bird-flu outbreak in U.S. history. Per USDA policy, producers cull entire flocks when the virus is found, so millions of egg-laying hens were destroyed, supply tightened, and prices spiked. That is a genuine supply shock — but it is not the whole story.

The cartel underneath

Over the past fifty years the U.S. egg industry has consolidated dramatically. What used to be thousands of producers is now a handful of giants. The largest, Cal-Maine Foods, sells roughly 20% of all U.S. shell eggs and owns more than 8% of the national flock. When a market is this concentrated, coordination stops being hard — it becomes the default.

Rigging the benchmark

In June 2026, the U.S. Justice Department and 17 state attorneys general sued Cal-Maine, Hickman’s Egg Ranch, and Versova (now Central Valley Eggs) for manipulating Urner Barry — a private market-reporting company whose daily quotations effectively set egg prices for grocery stores and restaurants nationwide. The complaint alleges the companies coordinated, “behind the scenes to raise prices,” sharing bidding information to artificially inflate the benchmark during the 2022–2025 window.

This is the signature enshittification move: don’t just raise your own price — capture the mechanism that sets everyone’s price. Manipulate the index and the whole market moves with you.

The settlement that wasn’t a consequence

The resolution: the companies paid $3.3 million and agreed to donate 53 million eggs to food banks. Cal-Maine’s share was $1.5 million to the states plus 30 million donated eggs — and no penalty, no fine. For a company whose gross profit margins reportedly climbed fivefold during the egg crisis, that is pocket change. It is the textbook case of a fine being treated as the cost of doing business.

Why it’s rot

• Consolidation handed a few firms control over an essential food.
• A private benchmark (Urner Barry) became a price lever, hidden from consumers.
• Bird flu served as cover — legitimate supply disruption masked coordinated inflation.
• There’s precedent: in the earlier UEP Certified price-fixing litigation, Kraft, General Mills, Kellogg, and Nestlé alleged the industry’s animal-welfare program was used as a pretense to cut hen numbers and production.

The bottom line: egg prices have fallen from their historic highs — around $2.14 a dozen by mid-2026 — but the structure that enabled the gouging hasn’t changed. Bird flu is still a threat, tariffs and imported eggs now complicate the picture, and the same few giant producers still sit atop the cartel. The virus wasn’t the whole story. It never was.

Watch: Egg producers will pay and donate 53M eggs to settle price-fixing claims