Some consumers and lawmakers upset over high egg prices believe they’ve found a villain: Cal-Maine. The little-known company produces one out of every five eggs sold in the U.S. And in the midst of a national egg shortage and a bird flu epidemic, Cal-Maine has been raking in the profits. But are the accusations against Cal-Maine fair? WSJ’s Patrick Thomas investigates. Annie Minoff hosts. Further Listening: -An Eggspensive Dilemma -Bird Flu and the High Price of Eggs Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Americans eat a lot of eggs. And that includes our colleague Patrick Thomas, who likes them scrambled.
A go-to on the weekend, you know, bagel and scrambled eggs, right?
Patrick covers agriculture.
People eat about an egg a day, roughly, and a hen produces roughly an egg a day. So the easiest math to think of the egg industry is that everyone has their own hen.
Personal chicken?
Everyone's got a personal chicken.
But over the past few years, a lot of those chickens have died, more than 150 million of them, as waves of bird flu have swept the country. That's helped catapult egg prices to historic highs, angering consumers. And some are pointing the finger at more than just bird flu. They're blaming a company called CalMaine. CalMaine Foods, the biggest egg producer in America, just posted a massive profit.
$509 million. That is three times their quarterly profit for the same quarter last year. Here they are at the end of the year recording record profit. So they raised all the prices for no reason at all.
Cal Maine is the largest egg producer in the country. It supplies one out of every five eggs that Americans eat. Despite that, it's not well-known, partly because CalMaine's name isn't on the egg carton. Its eggs sell under local brand names. But it's also because the company's pretty secretive. It doesn't do investor calls and rarely gives media interviews.
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