Commercial buyers and grocery store consumers are finding out eggs are costing more and more as the summer goes on.
The problem: a decrease in eggs on the market and a steady demand, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So far this year, avian flu has taken out roughly 50 million laying hens in the United States, which is about 10 percent of all chickens whose eggs are harvested.
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Eggs prices are already among the most volatile food prices, and the decrease in supply is having major impacts.
Italian People’s Bakery, based in Trenton, who gets their eggs from a poultry farm, hasn’t experienced a loss in supply, but they definitely agree that commercial buyers are currently taking the brunt of the impact. “If you have a supplier than their allocating supply for you, but if you don’t have a supplier and you’re trying to go to one now, you’ll find they won’t distribute to you,” said Director of Operations Joel Harris.
According to Italian People’s Bakery, who has a local shop in Levittown, and Piazza’s Bakery, based in Falls Township, both businesses are eating the costs associated with the higher-priced eggs in an effort to keep costs from directly affecting their customers.
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“Its terrible, it actually affects us more right now since we haven’t done a price increase. I don’t want to raise the prices and then have to do it again, I don’t want to do that to my customers,” said Piazza’s owner John Hose.
For Hose and Harris, the promise exists that prices may soon fall. “It seems like right now it’s backing up,” said Hose. “A bucket of eggs went from being $33 to $106, now it’s probably down to $95, and it seem to be holding to that.”
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If the madness with egg costs does however continue to rise, bakeries will be forced to up their prices. “It’s going to start affecting other businesses now who use eggs as a product. Many distributors are running low on inventory and so people are going to see the costs increase elsewhere,” said Hose.
Recently, Bensalem-based Rita’s Italian Ice announced they will stop serving their popular custard at more than 600 locations and replace it with soft-serve ice cream due to the egg shortage. The company said on their website they will bring back the custard “as soon as we know that we have access to a sustainable supply of eggs.”
A U.S. Department of Agriculture report estimates that eggs prices – currently averaging between $1.60 and $1.66 per a dozen nationwide – could read as high as $1.87 per dozen by the end of 2015. The previous all-time high average was set in 2014 when the national average for a dozen eggs reached $1.42.
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Bloomberg.com reported in June that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts said American consumers could spend between $7.5 billion and $8 billion more on eggs and products include eggs as ingredients in 2015.
To help food producers, federal officials recently announced that liquid eggs can be imported by the Netherlands to help ease demand issues.
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“I’ve been told by the producers it may take up to two years to get back up and running to where they were before they got hit with the flu,” Cory Martin, director of government relations for the American Bakers Association, said of how the shortage is impacting baking operations.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated that avian flu viruses do not usually infect humans, except in rare cases. As of Monday, no human avian flu cases have been reported recently in the United States.
