Egg prices easing

Egg prices are finally coming down after a year when a carton could feel like a luxury item. The clearest sign came from Cal-Maine Foods, the country’s biggest egg seller, which said fiscal third-quarter net sales fell to $667 million from $1.4 billion a year earlier as shell-egg prices cooled. That drop does not mean Americans suddenly stopped eating eggs. It means the price spike that inflated egg-company revenue last year has started to unwind as supply moves closer to normal. Egg prices swing hard because eggs are a fresh product with a short replacement cycle. If millions of laying hens disappear in a disease outbreak, stores cannot refill that gap overnight the way they can with canned food or pasta. The disease behind the chaos is highly pathogenic avian influenza, the bird-flu strain that has repeatedly hit commercial flocks. The American Farm Bureau Federation said 15.5 million birds were affected in January and February 2026 alone. That sounds enormous, and it is, but the comparison that matters is last year. Farm Bureau said the early-2026 total was 56 percent lower than the same period in 2025, which gave producers a better chance to rebuild flocks instead of falling further behind. March also brought a break in the pressure. Farm Bureau said detections slowed in recent weeks, which helped steady supply just as the market moved out of the worst of its winter turbulence. Wholesale prices show the same story in plain numbers. The United States Department of Agriculture said in its April 3 egg market overview that large white shell eggs in the Midwest were down to $1.46 per dozen delivered to warehouses, while California large-shell benchmarks fell to $1.74 per dozen. Consumer trackers are now catching up to that wholesale move. NBC News’ grocery tracker showed price relief for eggs as of April 7, which means the drop is no longer just a farm-and-distributor story and is starting to reach supermarket shelves. The company results from Cal-Maine help explain how fast the market has turned. Food Business News reported that specialty eggs and prepared foods made up more than half of Cal-Maine’s fiscal 2026 third-quarter sales for the first time, partly because conventional egg prices fell so sharply. Cal-Maine’s own figures show how uneven the business has become. Conventional egg sales dropped 72.1 percent from a year earlier, with selling prices down 70.1 percent and volumes down 6.7 percent, according to the company’s quarterly results. The United States Department of Agriculture is still not calling the egg market fully healed. Its March outlook said 2026 table-egg production expectations were lowered because of recent bird-flu losses, even as price forecasts were also lowered because market trends have weakened. That combination sounds strange until you picture both sides of the shelf at once. Supply is better than it was during the worst outbreaks, but shoppers and food buyers also pulled back after two years of sticker shock, which has helped cool prices faster. So the egg story in April 2026 is not that bird flu disappeared. It is that outbreaks have been smaller than last year, flock rebuilding has been strong enough to restore more supply, and the panic pricing of 2025 is giving way to something closer to a normal grocery aisle.