Skyrocketing egg prices putting a strain on Butler County businesses
Egg prices have cracked record highs, forcing local consumers and businesses to tweak their budgets in the face of a nationwide spike.
The ongoing struggle has trickled down the supply chain to businesses where eggs are a vital ingredient to staying afloat.
Batch, a local bakery in Saxonburg, goes through 60 dozen eggs each week.
A year ago, co-owner Meghan Pohl said they paid $36 for a case of 15 dozen of eggs. That number has risen to $97 per case, meaning the cost of 60 dozen eggs now sits at $388.
While it’s far from a preferred solution, she said they’ll have no choice but to charge more for quiche, which is baked fresh every Saturday and has become one of their most popular menu items.
“We’re definitely going to have to raise prices on the quiche,” Pohl said. “Since (the pandemic), there’s been different spikes on certain inventory. They’ve fluctuated a little bit, but this one has been expensive.”
As owner of a business that’s been a staple in the Saxonburg community for more than a decade, Pohl said she hopes her customers can empathize with the added financial burden.
“I think for the most part our customers really do understand,” she said. “They all feel it. It’s not something that they can’t see for themselves too when they go to the grocery store. It’s something we’re all feeling the hurt from it.”
By the same token, exorbitantly high costs have turned what was once a cheap breakfast commodity into more of a luxury for many grocery shoppers.
Local store owner Doug Sprankle, whose family owns three Sprankle’s Neighborhood Markets, said he’s seen the increased level of attention being paid to the eggs.
“In general, a lot of people really don’t focus on price all that much when they go to shop,” he said. “People aren’t focused as much on the price of eggs or milk because in their mind, it’s just a commodity that they need. So all of a sudden, when that commodity starts changing the game, people start paying attention.”
The steady rise of a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza, better known as bird flu, has devastated the egg industry, forcing farmers to slaughter flocks and temper production expectations.
Bird flu has been detected in more than 156 million commercial poultry birds, wild aquatic birds, and backyard or hobbyist flocks in the United States since 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The disease is quite deadly to the birds,” said Torey Fischer, a poultry educator with Penn State University extension. “When they come down with that, they do all end up getting depopulated and those flocks all have to start from scratch. That really interrupts the whole production process.”
Restarting a flock can be a frustrating months-long endeavor, she said.
“They (farmers) have to raise laying hens up again and it takes awhile before they will start laying eggs again,” Fischer said. “Depending on the process of depopulating those birds and making sure that disease is no longer present on the farm, it can take varying amounts of time. They have to wait until that disease is completely eradicated before they can restock those birds. It’s usually 18 to 20 weeks from the time when they get chicks until they start laying eggs again. Even at that point, they’re not to their peak production yet.”
As those timelines increase across the country, a potential egg shortage in the coming weeks and months could have even harsher ramifications on the prices.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, egg prices are estimated to increase by nearly 20% in 2025 in comparison to 2.2% for food prices in general.
“We don’t see this going down anytime soon,” Pohl said.
