Big Egg’s Price-Fixing Scandal

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:05)
Whenever we need someone to crack the code on egg issues, we turn to our resident egg spurt, agricultural reporter, Patrick Thomas. And I guess for The Journal, we can call you our egg correspondent at this point. I mean, you talk about other stuff with us.

**Patrick Thomas** (0:22)
Of course.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:22)
But I feel like this is the thing you come back for.

**Patrick Thomas** (0:25)
Isn't it fun to talk about eggs again?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:26)
It's been like- Always.

**Patrick Thomas** (0:27)
How long has it been? About a month?
Or I'm just kidding, a year and a couple months.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:33)
About a year ago, Patrick talked to us about egg inflation. Prices were soaring and customers were upset.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:41)
The Agriculture Department predicts egg prices could soar another 20% this year.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:47)
Egg prices are at an all-time high. The Consumer Price Index says they rose yet again last month to $6.23 per dozen.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:56)
At the time, egg producers blamed those sky-high prices on bird flu, which was absolutely deadly for America's egg-laying hens. As of last year, more than 150 million chickens and turkeys had been killed by the virus. But it turns out there was another reason for those crazy egg prices.
Just last week, the Department of Justice laid out the findings of a more than year-long investigation.

**Patrick Thomas** (1:26)
The department has come out and outlined some behavior by executives at some of the big egg companies, saying essentially that there was a coordinated effort among executives to try and keep egg prices high as long as they could.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:46)
The word that comes to mind is conspiracy. Is that fair?

**Patrick Thomas** (1:51)
That's what the Department of Justice would say.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:56)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, July 10th.
Coming up on the show, Inside Big Eggs Price Fixing Scandal.

**SPEAKER_7** (2:23)
This episode is presented by Accenture. When you're advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.

**Jessica Mendoza** (3:00)
The intricacies of the egg supply chain start with a chicken, or a lot of chickens.

**Patrick Thomas** (3:07)
So in the egg world, there's these massive complexes spread out across rural America that house tens of thousands of hens, in some cases hundreds of thousands of hens.

**Jessica Mendoza** (3:22)
Ideally, egg producers have one egg-laying hen per person in the US. That number keeps supply at a place where producers say, they can make a decent profit.

**Patrick Thomas** (3:33)
We went over this before in past episodes. So every person eats about an egg a day, right? I think we went over that and everybody's got their own.

**Jessica Mendoza** (3:40)
Yes, we did that math. We all have our own personal chicken.

**Patrick Thomas** (3:42)
We have our own personal chicken laying hens. When that gets out of whack, one way or the other, too many, too few, it messes with the prices.

**Jessica Mendoza** (3:51)
That's what the bird flu did. The virus wiped out millions of birds across the country, and they weren't easy to replace.

**Patrick Thomas** (3:59)
You know, we're dealing with live animals. You can't just turn on and off the sink of eggs, right?
You can't just call up more hens from the bench, so to speak, and bring them online.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:12)
So, fewer hens meant fewer eggs meant higher prices. But after a couple of years of egg prices staying high, some people started wondering if there might be something else going on as well.

**Patrick Thomas** (4:27)
Some advocates and some different nonprofit NGO groups in the background, some lawyers, people started questioning if the prices that we were seeing at the grocery store went beyond just supply and demand dynamics that the companies were harping on. Was there other activities going on where the companies were basically never letting a good crisis go to waste, right?

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:52)
Basically, was the bird flu providing cover for price gouging? The questions came as the price of eggs became a political issue, swept up in bigger dissatisfaction with inflation and the rising cost of living.

**Patrick Thomas** (5:05)
So the backdrop is we just finished up the 2024 election. Food inflation was a really big topic in that presidential election.

**Jessica Mendoza** (5:14)
Oh, yeah.