The Real Reason Eggs Cost Six Dollars

It's Monday, October twelfth. I'm vegetarian, so eggs have always been one of my go-to protein sources. A couple years ago, I remember standing in the grocery aisle staring at a carton priced at six dollars and twenty-three cents for a dozen large eggs and thinking, okay, bird flu is bad. The narrative was everywhere: avian influenza was wiping out millions of laying hens, supply was crushed, and this was just what eggs cost now. It made sense. Fewer hens, fewer eggs, higher prices. Econ 101.

I bought the explanation. Almost everyone did. And part of the explanation was true. Bird flu did kill millions of hens. But the Department of Justice just settled a case that reveals something else was going on at the same time. Something that had nothing to do with sick chickens and everything to do with three companies coordinating behind the scenes to push prices higher on purpose. And the mechanism they used is something almost nobody has ever heard of.

There is a company called Urner Barry. It was founded in 1858, which makes it older than the light bulb. Based in Toms River, New Jersey, it publishes daily price quotations for proteins: beef, pork, poultry, seafood, and eggs. If you are a grocery store, a restaurant chain, or a food distributor buying eggs by the truckload, your contract almost certainly references the Urner Barry price. Billions of eggs are sold every year at prices tied to what Urner Barry says they are worth.

How Urner Barry arrives at that number is the part that matters. Every day, egg producers submit bids on something called the Egg Clearinghouse, a spot market where producers buy and sell eggs among themselves. Urner Barry monitors this bidding activity and uses it as one of the primary inputs into its daily price quotation. If producers are bidding high, Urner Barry reports that the market price is high. And because virtually every egg contract in the country is formula-priced off the Urner Barry benchmark, a nudge upward in the quotation becomes a real price increase across the entire supply chain, from the farm to your grocery cart.

This is not some abstract financial thing. This is the price you pay. And what the Justice Department found is that for nearly three years, between June 2022 and March 2025, three of the biggest egg producers in America were coordinating their bids specifically to push that number up.

The three companies are Cal-Maine Foods, which is the largest egg producer in the country with about twenty percent of the market and roughly fifty million laying hens; Versova, another major producer based in Iowa; and Hickman's Egg Ranch, based in Arizona.

According to the complaint filed in federal court in Iowa, these three companies used five coordinated tactics to inflate Urner Barry's daily quotation. They submitted a large number of bids to make it look like demand was surging. They made sure multiple companies were bidding at the same time so Urner Barry would see a diverse set of market participants all supposedly needing eggs. They concentrated their bids in the hours right before Urner Barry published its daily number. They submitted bids that were unlikely to ever result in actual trades, meaning they were puffing the market without ever intending to buy. And they executed trades at premium prices to leave a paper trail of high numbers.

In December 2022, the CEO of Hickman's sent an email to executives at Versova and Cal-Maine. The message was: submit "strong bids, early and often" to push prices higher. All three companies then did exactly that, submitting dozens of bids at elevated prices. Urner Barry's quotation went up. And because those quotations are the basis for contracts across the entire industry, the price of eggs at every grocery store in America went up too.

Here's the part that makes the mechanism almost impossible to explain away as coincidence. In March 2025, the DOJ informed these companies it was investigating and instructed them to preserve documents. According to the complaint, egg price quotations dropped significantly from their peak after the companies learned of the investigation. The same producers, the same hens, the same bird flu. The only thing that changed was that somebody was watching.

The conspiracy ran from June 2022 to March 2025. During that period, the retail price of a dozen eggs hit that all-time high of six dollars and twenty-three cents. Cal-Maine reported quarterly gross profits of five hundred and nine million dollars, more than triple what it made the year before and nearly eight times what it made at the start of the bird flu outbreak. The company's sales volume barely changed. What changed was the price per egg.

In June 2026, the DOJ and seventeen state attorneys general reached a settlement with Cal-Maine, Versova, and Hickman's. The terms: the three companies will pay a combined three point three million dollars and donate fifty-three million eggs to food banks across the country. They also agreed to stop coordinating their bids and to appoint antitrust compliance officers.

None of the companies admitted wrongdoing. Cal-Maine's position is that its conduct was lawful. Hickman's, which was acquired by a Brazilian company called Mantiqueira in November 2025, said the conduct happened before the acquisition.

Three point three million dollars is a rounding error for a company that did two point nine billion dollars in revenue last year. Cal-Maine alone sold one point two billion dozen eggs in fiscal 2026. The fifty-three million eggs being donated sounds like a lot until you realize Cal-Maine's hens produce that many eggs in about nine hours.

Some advocacy groups said the settlement was too small. Angela Huffman, the president of Farm Action, put it this way: "Consumers paid record prices while dominant egg producers reported extraordinary profits, yet the result is another settlement that corporations can treat as the cost of doing business."

There is context that makes this pattern look less like a one-time mistake and more like how this industry operates. In November 2023, a federal jury in Illinois found Cal-Maine and other egg producers liable for conspiring to inflate egg prices between 2004 and 2008. That case involved a different scheme, coordinating supply restrictions under the cover of animal welfare standards, but the core dynamic was the same: a concentrated industry using its market power to push prices above where a competitive market would set them.

It has acquired twenty-six companies since 1989. It sells to a majority of large US food retailers. And the price those retailers pay is set, at least in part, by the benchmark that Cal-Maine was bidding into.

There is this category of things in the economy that function like wallpaper. You see them every day, you never think about them. A private company in New Jersey publishing a daily number. Three egg producers submitting bids to a clearinghouse. A formula in a contract between a distributor and a grocery chain. None of it looks like anything. But when you stack them together, those invisible pieces are what actually determine whether a dozen eggs costs two dollars or six dollars. And the people operating those invisible pieces know exactly what they're doing.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.