Chicken prices down, eggs way up. Which came first?

Dave Rutigliano tracks inflation in both his hats, as a Connecticut lawmaker on the panel that sets state spending and, mostly, as a partner in a group of six Connecticut restaurants.

Take chicken and eggs, two food staples that should tell us the direction of inflation.

Eggs have dropped in price lately but they remain at double their pre-pandemic prices or even higher. A dozen ovules still cause a shell-shocking at the cash register.

Chicken? Like eggs, prices for the bird flew the coop in 2022. Then they flopped back down. We’re clucking about wings and breasts ringing up at or even below the levels we saw before the pandemic, long before inflation gripped its claws around the world. But they’re starting to creep back up again.

So, eggs are way up, chicken is down and they’re moving in opposite directions. Which came first? More important for those of us who need to eat, what do we make of all this, besides a chicken omelette?

“The chicken hurt more than the eggs. I buy a lot of chicken,” said Rutigliano, a Trumbull Republican whose company owns SBC Restaurant and Beer Bar in Milford, Sitting Duck Taverns in three locations and Local Kitchen & Beer Bar in two towns.

Go to a breakfast joint and you’ll hear the opposite.

You might think prices for chicken and eggs would rise and fall together because, you know, biology and all that. Not true.

“Two different flocks, you’ve got to remember,” said Tim Adams, partner at J. Timothy’s Taverne in Plainville, which sells so many wings it buys them under long-term contracts based on a commodities index.

Adams, Rutigliano and Stew Leonard Jr. of the supermarket chain that bears his name all described the swings of chicken and egg prices as a feathered symphony affected by the pandemic shutdown, the rebound, the avian flu that killed millions of birds in 2022 and now a marketplace built not only on supply and demand but also on the persistent tug of inflation.

The price swings of these two kitchen basics illustrate a broader point: Most of us just see consumer prices drift generally upward – at a 6.4 percent annual clip in January, 10 percent for food, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. But the folks whose livelihoods depend on very specific commodities, like chicken and eggs, or maybe concrete and wood, live by a cacophony of prices that bounce all over the place.

“As some things have come down, other things have come up. Overall, we’re still up,” Rutigliano told me, with commodities such as frying oil still very high. “Every piece of restaurant equipment is either double in price or unavailable.”

Restaurants have taken it on the beak — raising prices “not as much as we should,” Rutigliano mused.

For Adams at J. Timothy’s, the numbers said he should have raised prices by $42 for a super-sized bucket of wings when chicken spiked. He of course couldn’t do that.

Let’s follow the numbers over the last few years. Stew Leonard’s, with seven stores including three in Connecticut, saw prices averaging $1.99 for a dozen conventional eggs in 2019, before the pandemic. That carton crept up to $2.29 by the end of 2022, then $3.39 in mid-2022 and a high of $5.99 by the end of last year before finally cracking.

“A lot of that had to do with the flu,” Stew Leonard Jr. said Friday. “One of our farmers told us he had 60 sheds, chicken houses, and he had to quarantine 50 of them, lock them right down.”

Now those eggs are $4.99 a dozen.

Chicken breasts took a different path: A stable $2.99 a pound all the way through 2021, then a grill-hot spike to $4.99 in the middle of last year, followed by a cooling off. Today, Stew Leonard’s spokeswoman Meghan Bell said — we’re back to the old $2.99 a pound.

Sorting it all out, Leonard describes multiple forces in the chicken-and-egg price stew. “There’s a difference between inflation and the commodity market,” he explained. “Even if there’s no inflation, you’re going to have these blips in fresh commodities.”

A big storm in the Midwest or rough waters at sea could send meat or fish prices up, for example. “You just ride the market,” Leonard said. “Your core costs are going up… Those are things that don’t come down again.”

Make room in those freezers, friends — Leonard predicted chicken breasts would strut back up to maybe $3.99 over the next few months, as they’re rising slowly again now. “A lot of it has to do with how many chickens they’re raising.”

Wings are seasonal, famously rising sharply as we head toward the Super Bowl. This year, J. Timothy’s sold nearly 15,000 pounds of the popular apps in the three or four days of the final NFL football weekend, Adams said.

He’s now paying a wholesale price in the range of $1.35 to $1.50 a pound after peaking at more than $4.

In another oddity, organic and free-range eggs have actually fetched lower prices than conventional in some places. Adams, however, saw a dozen high-end, organic eggs at $12 in a resort area in South Carolina this month. Let’s hope that’s an outlier, not a sign of what’s coming.

Like the chicken-and-egg question, no one has cracked the code on where prices are heading. But Rutigliano has a strong opinion about which came first. “The eggs, because without the eggs, you can’t get chickens.”

Adriana Morga/Hearst Connecticut Media Stew Leonard Jr. of the supermarket chain that bears his name described the swings of chicken and egg prices as a feathered symphony affected by the pandemic shutdown.