Egg prices up 37 percent from last year

Breakfast connoisseurs and Easter enthusiasts may be surprised by the rising price of eggs this spring.

They might be even more surprised to learn that they should be paying much more. It turns out that most grocery stores lose money on every dozen eggs they sell.

A survey conducted by the American Farm Bureau Federation found that on average egg prices are 37 percent higher than this time last year, at $1.80 per dozen. That’s a swing from 2017 when the survey found that egg prices had gone down 41 percent from spring 2016, to $1.32 per dozen.

The price increase can be credited to an uptick in American and foreign demand for eggs while American production stayed level, said Veronica Nigh, an economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation. The hike in foreign demand was exacerbated by a 2017 bird flu in South Korea, leading to a 663 percent increase in American egg exports there from 2016 to 2017, Nigh said.

Just within the United States, 2017 saw a 20-year record in egg consumption at 275.2 eggs per year, up half an egg from the year before.

“When you start multiplying that by 330 million (people), that’s a lot of eggs,” Nigh said.

According to Bloomberg News, wholesale egg costs have seen an even more acute spike in the past few weeks, federal data show. In the Midwest, the wholesale cost of a dozen eggs more than doubled in the five weeks through March 23 to $2.71. That’s a record since August 2015 when prices hit a record $2.77 during a bird flu outbreak.