Eggs Are Still Expensive. Is This Company to Blame?

鸡蛋依然昂贵。这怪这家公司吗?

The Journal.

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2025-05-23

19 分钟
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Some consumers and lawmakers upset over high egg prices believe they’ve found a villain: Cal-Maine. The little-known company produces one out of every five eggs sold in the U.S. And in the midst of a national egg shortage and a bird flu epidemic, Cal-Maine has been raking in the profits. But are the accusations against Cal-Maine fair? WSJ’s Patrick Thomas investigates. Annie Minoff hosts.   Further Listening: -An Eggspensive Dilemma  -Bird Flu and the High Price of Eggs Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  • Americans eat a lot of eggs.

  • And that includes our colleague Patrick Thomas, who likes them scrambled.

  • A go-to on the weekend, you know, bagel and scrambled eggs, right?

  • Patrick covers agriculture.

  • People eat about an egg a day, roughly.

  • and a hen produces roughly an egg a day.

  • So the easiest math to think of the egg industry is that everyone has their own hen.

  • Personal chicken?

  • Everyone's got a personal chicken.

  • But over the past few years, a lot of those chickens have died,

  • more than 150 million of them, as waves of bird flu have swept the country.

  • That's helped catapult egg prices to historic highs, angering consumers.

  • And some are pointing the finger at more than just bird flu.

  • They're blaming a company called CalMain.

  • CalMain Foods, the biggest egg producer in America, just posted a massive profit.

  • $509 million.

  • That is three times their quarterly profit for the same quarter last year.

  • Here they are at the end of the year recording record profit.

  • So they raised all the prices for no reason at all.

  • CalMain is the largest egg producer in the country.