‘Wild’ egg prices have WA restaurants wondering: How much will you pay for breakfast?
If the price of eggs at the grocery store has thrown wrenches into your family’s meal plans, you’re not alone. Restaurants, especially breakfast ones, and bakeries are feeling the same pinch at an exponential scale, and owners are publicly airing their grievances.
“I’m stressed.”
“What’s a breakfast restaurant to do?!”
“Such a mess right now. It just keeps getting harder to run a small food business.”
Since Sofia Davis and her mom, Galina Onischenko, opened their breakfast restaurant in Lakewood, Washington, in 2016, the wholesale price of a carton of 15-dozen eggs has climbed from $15 to $30, maxing out around $60 with seasonal fluctuation. But in recent weeks, Biscuit House managers have been driving around the South Sound in search of an option that doesn’t run more than $130 – their current tab as avian flu outbreaks decimated flocks and the holiday season strangled supply chains across the country.
Washington and other states with cage-free requirements on the books have been more acutely impacted by the ramifications of H5N1 virus, according to the year’s first market report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Cage-free flocks shrunk by 56% in 2024, compared to 39% for conventional caged hens.
The spike has left restaurant owners and bakers scrambling for the best long-term answer to a problem that experts say is unlikely to be resolved any time soon.
“As a breakfast place, I can’t not offer eggs. I can’t pivot and say, ‘No eggs!’ when the majority of my menu is omelets and eggs,” Davis said in a Jan. 15 phone call.
They go through 1,000 or 2,000 eggs a week. What was costing them about 33 cents a piece is now 72 cents – an increase of 118%.
“That’s a showstopper for us,” added Davis.
A visit to several grocery stores in Pierce County in early January revealed a dizzying range of prices, some exceeding $11 a dozen. Whole Foods in University Place was limiting purchases to three dozen per customer, at $5-7 each, and warned that the eggs in the fridge fell short of the Amazon-owned brand’s usual welfare standards. In South Tacoma, WinCo Foods had organic eggs from Gold Circle Farms in Fullerton, California, and Wilcox Family Farms in Roy, Washington, for upwards of $6 a dozen. A sign on the fridge door said that bird flu had affected supply and thus prices.
At Side Piece Kitchen in South Tacoma, co-owner and chef Hailey Hernandez said they crack some 150 dozen eggs a week for their cult-followed biscuit sandwiches and cheesecakes. In early January, she called six different wholesalers but couldn’t find the Certified Humane eggs they typically use. The pasture-raised eggs, produced by free-roaming hens, reach beyond cage-free and free-range animal welfare requirements, the latter of which requires that hens merely have access to the outdoors.
In two exasperated Instagram videos on Jan. 6, Hernandez stressed that the menu is built on eggs, and that they had already been forced to switch brands months ago. The eggs they could buy, from Yelm-based Stiebrs Farms, would cost her more than $140 a carton.
Without reprieve in sight, the chef and her team are exploring menu tweaks to offer egg-less sandwiches or even an egg-free cheesecake recipe.
No quick fix for Washington egg shortage
Are these restaurant owners overreacting?
Not quite, said Thomas Marsh, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at Washington State University and a founding member of the Global Burden of Animal Diseases program.
“Given the large outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza in the U.S., we should be concerned, for multiple reasons,” he said in a phone call with the News Tribune.
As of Jan. 3, according to the USDA, the wholesale cost of a dozen large, white shell eggs ranges from around $5.75 in the Midwest (the core of U.S. production) to $6 in the New York region and almost $9 in California. He added that around 75% of the egg market is traded through private, prearranged contracts, so detailed supplier-level numbers are hard to come by.
The good news of the USDA report is that the market was beginning “to show some retreat from recent record-high levels,” but the bad news is that demand remains basically unchanged.
“Eggs are a subsistence food,” providing beneficial nutrients especially for children and seniors, explained Marsh. “That’s part of the reason that we have what we call ‘habit formation.’ Even though prices change, people still will consume a certain amount of a good like eggs.”
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the average price of a dozen eggs since 1980. Prices spiked in 2015 but have generally been rising since around 2020, previously peaking in 2023 before the avian flu-induced jump in late 2024 and early 2025. As a subsistence food, eggs are “very sensitive” to supply changes, said WSU professor Thomas Marsh. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
That adoration means that egg prices are “very sensitive” to supply changes, “and that’s because people will pay more – they still eat eggs,” he said.
But why is it happening right here, right now?
“It’s kind of a perfect storm,” Marsh replied.
Avian flu has affected livestock dating back to the 1990s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but outbreaks worsened in 2022. Last year, they hit an unfortunate stride almost in lockstep with standard holiday-season demand.
Meanwhile, California, home to one of the largest concentrations of cage-free flocks in the country, was slammed in the last few months of the year. Officials declared a state of emergency as it spread through herds of dairy cows, too, and infected more than 60 people, most of whom had contact with animals.
There have been no official reports of person-to-person transmission, and scientists believe the current threat to the general public is low.
Impact of cage-free laws
Washington is one of at least nine states that has passed laws requiring cage-free production. Some, including Washington’s, also extend to the sale of eggs in any form.
Animal-welfare advocates fought for the changes, calling attention to unnatural, extremely crowded conditions for the birds and abuses such as trimming beaks to prevent pecking. While the American Egg Board, the leading trade association, has argued to maintain “consumer choice,” the movement has led to an undeniable shift in production methods: Almost 40% of U.S. flocks are now cage-free, according to the Humane Society.
The downside is that cage-free eggs, for the time being at least, cost more to produce than conventional ones, which has left states including Washington more vulnerable to uncontrollable events like avian flu.
“Disease events are really hard to deal with. It’s hard to predict when it’s gonna come and controlling it when it’s here,” said Marsh.
Affected flocks must be depopulated – meaning, birds must be killed – and the facilities cleaned and sanitized. The process of repopulating back to pre-flu numbers and getting the hens to laying age can take five to six months, producers have told him.
In other words: We’re in for a long ride.
“If H5N1 starts to slow down, then we will start to see prices go down toward historical trends,” said Marsh. General inflation, though, means that neither consumers nor restaurants should long for the days of $1 a dozen eggs.
Changing up menus and maybe prices, too
On Side Piece’s Instagram posts, commenters called out egg sightings at grocery stores and offered up the bounty of their backyard flocks.
Neither helps restaurants. For one, backyard chickens have accounted for most detected outbreaks in Washington, according to the state Department of Agriculture. Hernandez also stressed that commercial foodservice can only buy from licensed sources, and that raiding the fridge at Safeway gives her immense anxiety.
“This is WILD,” she told the News Tribune in a message.
Many restaurants shop at Costco, which has a business center in Fife. That’s where Biscuit House has been going since the egg shortage took serious hold, instead of getting much more convenient deliveries.
At the Cat & Rabbitt Cake Shop in Puyallup, Washington, Terryn Abbitt and co-owner Julia Brown said both the price surge and reliable availability were causing them strife, and they fear the worst is yet to come.
Sofia Davis (right) and her mother Galina Onischenko opened Biscuit House at 9702 South Tacoma Way in Lakewood in 2016. They have grown accustomed to general upticks and seasonal volatility but have never seen egg prices as high as they are right now. Courtesy/Biscuit House
Presuming they can source eggs at all, none of the small business owners wants to increase prices for their customers – but they might have no choice.
For now, Davis at Biscuit House is working to develop new menu items that don’t need eggs or that would work with another protein.
“We’re really just focused on finding the best price where we can and adjusting our menu where we need to,” she said, but it sure feels like a never-ending test.
“I can’t be too expensive or overpriced in the customer’s eyes,” she continued. “It’s not just food prices but coupled with wage increases. Finding the balance of what customers are willing to pay for breakfast and what we can afford to absorb – that’s the challenge right there.”