CNN – Supermarket prices are no longer skyrocketing – except, of course, if you’re buying eggs.
Egg prices spiked by 28.1% in August from 12 months ago, easily the biggest increase out of any food item tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The sticker shock in the egg aisle comes even as overall grocery prices are barely budging (up less than 1% in August from last year) and inflation cools across the US economy.
The main culprit for rising egg prices is a familiar one: bird flu.
Birds are getting sick, and that means fewer eggs and higher prices at the grocery store.
“Bird flu is the number one reason for higher prices, absolutely,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst and editor of SuperMarketGuru.com.
Egg supply is shrinking
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), more commonly known as the bird flu, has impacted nearly 101 million birds across 48 US states since January 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“Think about how they are housed: small spaces with lots of chickens,” said Lempert. “When one chicken gets bird flu, they’ve got to cull the entire flock. That’s the problem.”
That helps explain why total egg production in July fell 2.6% year-over-year, according to new data released Monday by the US Department of Agriculture.
The USDA also found that the number of egg-laying birds dropped for the second month in a row.
“Price impacts of the HPAI outbreak will be monitored closely,” the USDA said in August, adding that bird flu “contributed to elevated egg prices” this summer by “reducing the US egg-layer flock.”
Thankfully, eggs aren’t nearly as expensive as they were in late 2022 and early 2023. That bird flu-sparked price spike sent the average price of a dozen Grade A large eggs to a record of $4.82, according to the BLS …
