What The Heck Is Happening With the Price of Eggs?

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:17)

Tracy, it feels like, to some extent, that inflation is abating, is fading.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Every time we start a podcast saying that, I think we're just jinxing it, but sure.

Joe Weisenthal (0:29)

Well, we hope to be jinxing this one, because there is one category of food, of goods, that everyone is talking about these days. Eggs.

Tracy Alloway (0:42)

I am so excited to be talking about eggs. There are gonna be a lot of puns, I have to say.

Joe Weisenthal (0:46)

You're excited.

Tracy Alloway (0:47)

That's my warning for anyone listening to this episode, is I'm going to crack a bunch of terrible jokes. Or should I say yolks?

Joe Weisenthal (0:56)

You want to keep going, Tracy?

Tracy Alloway (0:58)

I'm a real comedian.

Joe Weisenthal (1:01)

So, egg prices are up a lot, and it's also personal to you, because in addition to all these puns, you are an aspiring egg farmer, aren't you?

Tracy Alloway (1:09)

I am like an armchair chicken breeder. I would love to raise a bunch of backyard chickens one day. I haven't yet had the opportunity, although now that I have two and a half acres in Northeast Connecticut, maybe one day I'm getting closer. But yeah, my dream is to have a flock of chickens, preferably silky chickens. Have you ever seen those?

They look like fluffy little muppets. So some silkies and maybe some Easter Eggers, because they produce the really cool looking eggs.

And yeah, declare egg independence. Just have my own supply of eggs.

Joe Weisenthal (1:41)

So how about this? I have a good idea for this episode.

How about we talk for about five or 10 minutes about why egg prices are going up, and then just 30 minutes on farming advice, just a pure agricultural episode.

Tracy Alloway (1:56)

That sounds perfect. Also, you're gonna have to include 10 minutes for me to just give all the random egg facts that I know.

Joe Weisenthal (2:02)

Well, okay, maybe we should also let the guest give random egg facts, too.

Tracy Alloway (2:06)

Okay, if we have to. No, okay, eggs have suddenly become a big talking point. And I'm a little bit unclear why, because egg prices have been going up for a while. There's been this big outbreak of avian flu in the US and elsewhere in the world. Feed prices have been going up. And so we did see, for instance, benchmark egg prices. There is a egg price benchmark go up, I think something like 300% over the past year. It was like a dollar for a dozen Midwest US eggs. And now it's up to more than $4.

Egg CPI, which you can measure is up, I think 59% year on year.

But it has been happening for a while. And yet it seems to have exploded into the public consciousness relatively recently.

Joe Weisenthal (2:52)

That egg CPI chart is pretty wild. We have it on the terminal going back to 1946 It's shooting higher. And I would say eggs, kind of like gasoline, are one of these highly salient prices that people notice in a way. They buy them regularly.

It's like you just know, people have some intuitive sense how much they pay for eggs as opposed to, I don't know, how much they pay for auto insurance.

Tracy Alloway (3:16)

It's something you're exposed to on a relatively frequent basis. And it does become personal because the way that you buy eggs also impacts the prices you're seeing. So if you live out in the country and you're buying eggs from a local farmer, the prices might well be lower than in the grocery store right now because my understanding is that it's the big, big producers, the supermarkets, or the people who supply the supermarkets who have actually been hit the hardest by the flu.

Joe Weisenthal (3:43)

Well, let's learn more from our guest. We have, I believe, the perfect guest to talk about eggs and how to price them and how to make them. We're going to be speaking with Glenn Hickman. He is the president of Hickman's Family Farms, a company that has 10 million chickens producing eggs overall in the company. So Glenn, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Glenn Hickman (4:08)

My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Joe Weisenthal (4:10)

You know, before we even get into the price of eggs and all that, what do you tell us a little bit about Hickman's Family Farms? Like, how big is it? How does it compare? How does it distribute? Like, just to describe, why should we listen to you?