Liz Fergus
As families struggle with record-high egg prices, Cal-Maine Foods is raking in billions—exposing a troubling reality about who really benefits from our broken food system.
While Americans face empty grocery shelves and record-high egg prices, one company is laughing all the way to the bank.
American shoppers are paying the highest prices for eggs in living memory, with costs tripling in just three years. Meanwhile, Cal-Maine Foods—the nation’s largest egg producer—has seen a fourfold increase (400%) in profits in just one year, with annual profits on pace to top $1 billion for the first time in the company’s history. The company’s market value has doubled in two years, and its stock is outperforming Wall Street darlings.
But who really benefits when the price of eggs becomes a national crisis? And what does this mean for the millions of hens behind every carton?
Cracking open Cal-Maine’s windfall
Cal-Maine’s position is clear: they dominate the shell egg market, selling about one in every five eggs in the US. Their advantage? Massive scale, robust distribution, and partnerships with recognizable brands like Eggland’s Best and Land O’Lakes. While smaller competitors scramble to keep up, Cal-Maine’s 50 million hens and nationwide reach give it a strategic edge.
When bird flu swept through the US poultry industry, killing more than 150 million chickens since 2022, the supply of eggs plummeted and prices soared. Shoppers faced empty shelves, breakfast chains like Waffle House and Denny’s added surcharges, and some families skipped eggs altogether.
Yet Cal-Maine weathered the storm with fewer losses than most and quickly ramped up output. Net sales for the second quarter of fiscal year 2025 hit $954.7 million—an 82.5% year-over-year increase. Net income surged to $219.1 million, a nearly 13-fold jump from the prior year.
Supply, demand—or something more?
Concerns about price fixing aren’t just coming from consumer advocates. Recent investigations by Food & Water Watch and Hunterbrook, as well as ongoing scrutiny from the Department of Justice, have drawn national attention to the possibility of coordinated price manipulation and anti-competitive practices in the egg industry.
Cal-Maine’s CEO insists it’s all about supply and demand. “Someone has to get blamed for everything. They’re looking for a villain,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “We don’t control the power to lower egg prices.”
But the story isn’t quite so simple. Critics—along with a Justice Department investigation—point to Cal-Maine’s purchasing practices on private exchanges. By buying eggs from other producers on the Egg Clearinghouse, Cal-Maine may be influencing industry-wide prices and limiting supply. Some watchdogs, like Farm Action, argue that this practice contributed to the rapid inflation consumers felt at the checkout.
This isn’t the first time the company has faced scrutiny. In 2020, Texas’ attorney general sued Cal-Maine for alleged price gouging during the pandemic. And in 2023, a federal jury ruled that Cal-Maine and other big egg producers had restricted supply in the early 2000s to raise prices—resulting in $53 million in damages to food companies like Kraft Heinz and Kellogg.
Industry price benchmarks for eggs are often set by services like Urner Barry, which, according to Hunterbrook, rely on self-reported data from the very companies they are supposed to monitor. This system raises serious concerns about transparency and potential conflicts of interest—giving large producers an outsized ability to influence market prices behind the scenes.
Additionally, while egg producers often point to rising feed and energy costs as reasons for higher prices, these input costs have actually declined since their pandemic peaks. This weakens the industry’s narrative that input costs alone justify today’s record-high prices.
The hidden cost to hens
Beyond the economics, there’s a world most shoppers never see. At Cal-Maine’s Edwards, Mississippi complex, 14 metal barns each house over 50,000 egg-laying hens—750,000 birds in total, side by side in vast industrial sheds. While the company touts investments in cage-free infrastructure—a $40 million commitment for new cage-free houses and conversions that will bring one million more hens out of cages by late summer 2025—the reality is that most US hens still endure extreme confinement for their short, demanding lives.
Even as Cal-Maine moves to expand its cage-free offerings, the shift is slow and the numbers are staggering. The company sold nearly 330 million dozens of eggs in a single quarter, with specialty (including cage-free) sales making up just over a third. For the average hen, life is still far from the “natural” barnyard image that graces so many cartons.
A future for hens and shoppers?
Is there hope for a fairer, more compassionate egg industry? Cal-Maine’s investments in cage-free production and value-added egg products (think wraps and liquid eggs) are a response to consumer demand for better treatment of animals and more ethical food choices. But the company’s record profits and the slow pace of change raise pressing questions:
- Are these cage-free investments about genuine progress—or just market positioning?
- As families struggle to afford basics, why isn’t more of Cal-Maine’s windfall being used to improve transparency, animal welfare, or price relief?
- Can true transformation happen in an industry that continues to treat animals as commodities and prioritizes shareholder returns above all else?
What you can do
As supporters and consumers, you have the power to demand better—from supermarkets, lawmakers, and companies like Cal-Maine. By choosing brands that commit to transparency and meaningful animal protection (not just empty promises), by speaking out for fairer pricing, and by supporting organizations working for real change, you can help build a food system that works for everyone.
