The Justice Department is in the early stages of investigating major egg producers in the United States over possible antitrust violations as the price of eggs skyrockets, two people familiar with the matter said.
The department’s lawyers are preparing to send civil investigative demands — effectively subpoenas for civil investigations — to several producers, including Cal-Maine Foods and Rose Acre Farms, one of the people said. Investigators are looking at whether the companies are sharing sensitive information about pricing and supply, contributing to a spike in prices.
The inquiry is being run out of the antitrust division’s Chicago office, the people said.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation. Cal-Maine and Rose Acre did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. The Capitol Forum earlier reported the inquiry.
Egg prices began soaring last year, and they quickly became an issue in the presidential campaign. Producers have blamed the spread of avian flu, which has forced them to cull millions of hens, for tighter egg supplies and prices that have surpassed $8 a dozen in some areas.
The Justice Department’s inquiry may not lead to a lawsuit. Some lawmakers and advocacy groups previously called for federal regulators to investigate the industry’s pricing practices.
Roughly 15 percent of the country’s egg-laying chickens have been killed in the past four months, while wholesale egg prices have risen 255 percent, according to data from Expana, which tracks the prices of eggs.
The five largest producers, including Cal-Maine and Rose Acre, control roughly half of the egg market in the United States. Cal-Maine, which is publicly traded and controls about a fifth of the market, reported an 82 percent jump in revenues for the quarter that ended in late November, to $954 million from $523 million a year earlier. The surge was “primarily driven by an increase in the net average selling price of shell eggs as well as an increase in total dozens sold,” the company said.
But others say the industry may be limiting supplies, forcing prices higher.
“Egg producers and grocery stores may leverage the current avian flu outbreak as an opportunity to further constrain supply or hike up egg prices to increase profits,” a group of Democratic lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said in a letter to President Trump in January.
In a letter sent on Feb. 12 to the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, Farm Action, a group that opposes corporate monopolies in food and agriculture, called on the agencies to look into potential monopolization and anticompetitive coordination in the industry. Losses from culling have been “relatively modest” in relation to the size of the U.S. egg-laying flock, the group contends, while profit margins among producers have soared.
United Egg Producers, the industry’s trade association, placed the blame for soaring prices squarely on the severity of the avian influenza outbreak. After the industry lost more than 40 million egg-laying hens in all of 2024, 31 million were killed in just the first two months of this year as the virus accelerated, the group noted.
The highly pathogenic disease is “single-handedly responsible for the dramatic instability and losses in the nation’s egg supply,” Chad Gregory, the group’s chief executive, said in a statement.
In past outbreaks, Mr. Gregory said, a farm hit by the virus could typically recover in three to six months. In the current outbreak, however, the legally required recovery process can take more than a year.
“The onslaught of new cases has compounded the problems for egg farms’ ability to recover,” he said, “and it will take time to restore the nation’s egg supply.”
Emily Metz, the chief executive of the American Egg Board, echoed those sentiments in a statement. “To suggest that higher egg prices are the result of anything other than bird flu is a misreading of the facts and the reality,” she said.
Egg producers have been found liable in the past for controlling prices by restricting the supply. In 2011, major food companies including Kraft and General Mills sued the biggest egg producers and industry groups, claiming that they had colluded to reduce the supply to increase prices. The case went to a jury, which found in 2023 that the egg producers had unlawfully inflated prices. The producers were ordered to pay $17.7 million in damages, a figure that under antitrust law was tripled to $53 million.
Last year, under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Justice Department’s antitrust division began staffing its Chicago office to investigate potential antitrust violations in agriculture.
To address record-high egg prices, the Agriculture Department said in February that it was looking into importing more eggs and increasing funding for efforts to combat the spread of avian flu.
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