There could also be no kitchen desk factor in The united states extra crucial than the cost of meals.
Public officers and the media blamed top egg costs on fowl flu outbreaks and mentioned containing the outbreak in provide chains would decrease costs. In early March 2025, egg costs fell within the U.S., however those developments are more likely to opposite because of upper seasonal call for right through Easter and Passover.
Emerging costs and marketplace volatility have resulted in meals prices mountain climbing to 11.4% of American’s disposable source of revenue, the most important proportion since 1991.
Arresting those emerging prices, as I argue in my 2023 e book, method reinventing provide chains to handle the rising provide, call for and value volatility that has created uncertainty for shoppers for the reason that COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
I’ve described international provide chains, and provide chains within the U.S. specifically, as “efficiently broken.” Through this I imply that they aspire to supply low costs from economies of scale however lack enough resiliency to create steadiness.
With out addressing the systemic weaknesses in provide chains, I imagine 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 one among 9 states with a cage-free egg mandate, which calls for all eggs bought within the state to come back from cage-free amenities. The law has been proven to extend the cost of eggs by way of up to 50%.
Over the last twenty years, cage-free egg rules had been handed in states as shoppers have grown extra keen on the welfare of livestock. What that suggests varies from state to state since the time period cage-free isn’t regulated by way of a federal company. In Colorado, egg-laying hens will have to be housed in a cage-free gadget and will have to have at least 1 sq. foot of usable ground area consistent with chicken.
Colorado is the twenty eighth biggest egg manufacturer within the U.S., a long way at the back of Midwestern states corresponding to Iowa, Indiana and Ohio, nevertheless it has a couple of huge manufacturers corresponding to Morning Contemporary Farms, in addition to smaller ones such because the Colorado Egg Manufacturers Affiliation, a number 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 patrons 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 rules 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 stability worth, scale, resiliency and steadiness.
Provide chain problems
What’s using up the costs of eggs and different shopper items is the focus of manufacturers. The COVID-19 pandemic printed simply how susceptible costs and provide chains are.
5 years in the past this month, when the pandemic began, many merchandise was unavailable and dearer.
In 2022, a significant product recall of Similac resulted in a child components scarcity within the U.S. The child components marketplace is very concentrated, with 4 firms liable 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 resulted in the dearth.
Provide chain problems resulted in a U.S. scarcity of child components in 2022.
Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Common Pictures Crew by means of Getty Pictures
Then firstly of 2024, provides of insulin ran brief because of manufacturing problems at Eli Lilly, one of the vital 3 firms liable 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 way 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 have an effect on from Typhoon Maria that broken the island in 2017.
In all of those instances, the provision chain was once simply interrupted because of a reliance on a couple of huge manufacturers. In 2025, fowl flu and eggs are simply every other instance of The united states’s “efficiently broken” provide chain.
Hen flu and price of eggs
Within the U.S., the highest 5 egg manufacturers are liable for 40% of hens, with Mississippi-based Cal-Maine Meals by myself liable for 13% of overall U.S. manufacturing.
A median-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 occasions, value efficient for the American shopper. 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 right through one thing like a fowl flu outbreak. Higher farms create a better possibility of viral outbreak, which ends up in the will for culling hundreds of thousands of birds and a heightened possibility of viral replication and mutation.
The answer would possibly build up costs
Policymakers wish to cut back the unfold of illness at American egg factories to mitigate the unfold of fowl flu. However those measures are pricey.
Manufacturing unit farms build up the possibility of viruses to unfold unexpectedly or even mutate. Subsequently, fowl flu is a extra severe precursor of provide chain disruption than a typhoon or product recall as it has the prospective to create a public well being disaster.
One strategy to prohibit the unfold of fowl flu is to control the selection of hens allowed in one facility. This may result in smaller and extra farms around the U.S., but additionally upper shopper costs.
This answer would replicate different international locations corresponding to Canada, the place the typical facility dimension is far 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 firms flooding its marketplace with eggs and poultry that might value shoppers two to a few occasions much less.
But in March 2025, the cost of eggs in Canada is 50% less expensive than eggs within the U.S. since the nation has now not suffered the similar damages from fowl flu.
Regardless of the specter of a public well being disaster, American shoppers don’t wish to pay extra for eggs – and their leaders have promised they received’t must.
