As egg shortage continues, some businesses are starting to crack
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As egg shortage continues, some businesses are starting to crack
George Ohanessian co-owns Heidi’s Restaurant, a breakfast diner in Waltham, Massachusetts. These days, he’s spending less time at the grill than he’d like, because he’s been busy “finding eggs,” he said. “They’re expensive. They’re hard to find.”
Ohanessian spent the morning traveling from one egg wholesaler to the next. It’s been hit or miss.
“And when you get somewhere and they don’t have them, you’re like, ‘OK, where do I go next?’ It’s been very hard, it’s been very hard,” he said, adding that he’s paying almost three times more for eggs than he was just a few months ago.
He’s not alone. A particularly contagious strain of bird flu continues to spread on farms nationwide. Tens of millions of chickens have died as a result, and that’s sent the cost of eggs skyrocketing.
Last month, a dozen eggs at the grocery store cost more than $4 on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s roughly double the price from a year ago. (A dozen eggs will set you back even more in California.)
Because eggs are critical to Ohanessian’s business, the price increases are particularly tricky — and he can’t pass that on to his customers, he said. “It’s a family restaurant and we try to keep everything affordable so we can keep our customers happy. But I just don’t, you know — I don’t know what to do sometimes.”
There’s not much Ohanessian can do, because there currently just aren’t enough chickens laying eggs, according to Brian Moscogiuri, vice president at the wholesaler Eggs Unlimited.
“A general rule of thumb is that we need about one bird to every person in the country right now. I think we have about 340 million people in the United States,” he said.
That’s compared to around 300 million egg-laying hens after the recent flu outbreaks. That means “we’ve never seen prices this high before,” Moscogiuri said.
Moscogiuri sells eggs to retail stores, and he said a scarcity mindset among some shoppers can make matters worse.
“I’m a consumer myself, right? And if I go to the store and I see large dozens of $2.99, limit two, I’m probably going to grab two dozen as opposed to one dozen,” he said. “And I think, you know, in some cases, that creates more demand at some of these chains.”
And it’s not clear when more supply will come online. It takes time for egg farmers to get up and running after an avian flu outbreak, per Emily Metz is CEO of the American Egg Board, a trade group for egg producers.
“We have to humanely euthanize those birds to prevent their suffering,” she said.
Then, there’s sanitization of the farm. State and federal approvals of that sanitation. “And then we have to bring in new birds,” she said, “and those birds have to mature to a point that they’re starting to lay eggs — that’s a 6- to 9-month process, so unfortunately not a switch that can be flipped.”
A recovery in egg supply can only happen through a prolonged period with no new bird flu outbreaks on farms, Metz added. That’s something the industry is still waiting for.
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