For years, economists dismissed collusion as crankery and blamed bird flu for high prices. Then the feds found evidence that could prove the cranks right, and almost nobody noticed.

Illustration by Claudine Hellmuth/POLITICO (iStock) Steve Volk has written for Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and more.

When you see the cost of an everyday item — the kind you’re going to buy regardless of price — more than double in a year, do you get suspicious?

When it came to eggs, whose average price in a U.S. supermarket went from $1.93 per dozen in January 2022 to $4.82 a year later — and not even for the lovingly cared-for, cage-free variety — Americans had their choice of explanations. Some supply chain experts pointed to continued pandemic-era disruptions. The geopolitically minded cited impacts of war in agriculturally productive Ukraine, shrinking global supply while driving up fuel and feed costs.

Republicans blamed the Democratic administration for wild spending that prompted widespread “Bidenflation.”Most Americans appeared content with the prevailing rationale they were given: Bird flu, an epidemic with a near-100% mortality rate, contributed to the death of 43 million egg-laying hens in 2022 alone while consumers continued to crave omelettes.

Peter Carstensen, a law school professor and fellow at the American Antitrust Institute, watched the prices of eggs rise from his Wisconsin home and suspected all those explanations were ignoring the potential for human villainy in a market where demand remains fixed. “Eggs are a classic example of where collusion makes an awful lot of sense,” said Carstensen. “I am going to have my two eggs and bacon every Wednesday, and on Saturday as well, regardless of the price of eggs.”

The suspicion of antitrust hawks like Carstensen — that producers were choosing to raise prices in tandem to increase profits rather than competing in a way that would drive prices down — was dismissed by mainstream economists and commentators as the work of cranks looking past simple economics for a true crime story that could exist only in their minds. Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle waved away “internet memes and a fair amount of conspiracizing,” as she put it, “about monopolistic egg producers colluding to raid the pockets of hard-working, egg-loving Americans.”

Other free marketeers made it a Rorschach test of financial literacy flunked by those desperate to feed a populist cause. “You don’t need shadowy conspiracies of egg producers to understand the dynamics of egg-flation in the United States,” agricultural economist Jeremy Horpedahl wrote on a blog for the libertarian Cato Institute. “All you need to explain the price fluctuations of eggs is good old supply and demand.”The truth was out there. Investigators found what they considered evidence of a scheme in which three of the country’s largest egg producers coordinated inflated bids to a central price clearinghouse so as to artificially drive up prices in ways immediately felt by consumers, as the U.S. Justice Department and 17 state attorneys general outlined in a lawsuit.

It took three years for them to disentangle the alleged conspiracy, with limited consequences for the companies, which never admitted wrongdoing.

The cranks, it turned out, just saw what no one else did — and the rest of us are still catching up.

There are a few different ways to take stock of American egg prices. You can go to your neighborhood dairy aisle and examine the price tags posted under each carton. If you are inside the egg business yourself, producing and selling them by the truckload, you probably have tracked prices through a website called Urner Barry. With its origins as a 19th century market reporter, Urner Barry pulls in “protein price” data from companies all through the supply chain — retailers, processors, distributors and more.

It also collects bids that egg producers make for each other’s surplus inventory on an exchange called Egg Clearinghouse, Inc. Urner Barry takes in those bids even before they lead to any sale, as a signal of demand. The data it then publishes, broken down by regions of the country, sets suppliers’ big contracts with Walmart and other large retailers, ultimately trickling down to what you’re seeing at your local store.

Over the first nine months of 2022, those prices increased almost every day. Bird flu was ripping through hen houses across the country despite farmers’ best efforts to contain it. As news outlets — including The New York Times, CNN and POLITICO — explained it, the tightened supply was driving up prices as demand stayed constant.

In mid-October, that skyward trajectory — then averaging $3.42 per dozen that month — suddenly reversed. Prices fell by 50 cents in a single week, a consequence of what industry experts speculated might be consumers pulling back from egg purchases.

Days after that decline began, Glenn Hickman’s phone flashed with a new text message from his biggest competitor. Hickman was chief executive of the United States’ 16th largest egg producer, Hickman’s Egg Ranch, which had been founded in 1944 with a few chickens on the family’s Arizona farm and was still led by relatives in nearly every senior role. Over the course of 2022, Hickman had seen flocks nationwide devastated, shrinking the supply of egg-laying hens.

Now he was hearing from an executive at Cal-Maine, a Mississippi-based egg producer whose flock was roughly eight times larger than Hickman’s. For four months, according to federal investigators, the two companies had been in communication as they navigated the impact of flu on their industry. (Hickman’s and Cal-Maine did not respond to requests for comment.)“Let’s hold it today,” the text message read.

The two executives spoke by phone later that day to coordinate a response to the sudden price drop, U.S. Justice Department lawyers allege. They could do little to quickly move consumer demand, but they had the ability to create the illusion of it through bids on the surplus exchange for purchases they had no intent of completing. Supposed competitors could confect an artificial demand surge for their products by upping bids for eggs in volume and price without ever letting the transaction bake in — the perfect recipe for a price-fixing soufflé.

Over the course of that day, Hickman and Cal-Maine dominated trading at the Egg Clearinghouse, as reflected in court records. The coordination appears to have contributed to staving off the price collapse. (The Egg Clearinghouse did not respond to a request for comment.) On Oct. 18, prices started a new, upward climb, rising to $4.25 per dozen by December, a 120% increase since the start of the year.

That month, as families purchased ingredients for eggnog and holiday casseroles, the executives allegedly redoubled their efforts to jointly drive up prices. On the Monday before Christmas, representatives from the two companies — and a third, Iowa-based collaborative Versova — joined what had become a weekly conference call in which they worked on “bidding up” prices, in the words of a Cal-Maine executive quoted in court records. (Versova did not respond to a request for comment.)

Executives from the three companies kept calling one another all day as they watched their bids for surplus eggs bump up Urner Barry’s price quotes, court records demonstrate. The gambit worked: Urner Barry hiked price quotations for white, large shell eggs nationwide on Dec. 19. “Please consider posting strong bids, early and often,” Hickman wrote to his peers the next morning.

He watched as bids went into the clearinghouse. Of the first 16 that Tuesday, 15 of them came from Hickman’s. Hickman emailed the other executives, telling them to “hurry.”Cal-Maine, Hickman’s and Versova collectively submitted dozens of bids that day, eclipsing all other buyers combined. Urner Barry raised its prices again.

On Wednesday, Hickman saw evidence that Urner Barry was taking in data that would lower prices — “pull the market down,” in the words of one executive — and goaded his erstwhile competitors to respond. “As a group,” the executive followed up, “we need to bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often.”That Thursday, executives pushed to “light up the northwest bids,” referring to the multi-state region where eggs were slightly more expensive that day than in other regions. If they succeeded, Urner Barry was likely to raise prices nationwide. Dozens of bids later, they saw the results of their work.

Egg prices are “hitting records,” Hickman wrote to the other executives. “Great job in the northwest today!”Angela Huffman does not spend much time in the dairy aisle. She has enough egg-laying hens on her family’s 200-year-old farm in north-central Ohio to feed her family and supply a local grocer. But as the head of the antimonopoly group Farm Action, Huffman closely monitors agriculture prices, and as she watched the cost of eggs spike through 2022 she grew suspicious.

Most economists and media still pointed to the bird flu as the cause. In the United States, when a single case is detected on a poultry farm, the Agriculture Department requires the entire flock to be culled in order to prevent further spread. Cal-Maine, the only major publicly traded American egg company, cited the outbreak in a March 2023 investor announcement that touted its revenue doubling from the previous year. “Elevated market pricing continues, primarily due to the impact of the ongoing epidemic of highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has significantly reduced the nation’s egg-laying capacity,” the filing reads.

Huffman, though, had seen price-fixing allegations emerge in other ag sectors: Meat packers had blamed higher feed grain expenses for price hikes; fertilizer companies blamed the war in Ukraine, while their profits soared. “So that’s all to say, with eggs, we started hearing these prices have skyrocketed, and it’s because of the avian flu. We said we should look at this, because we’ve seen this before, and there might be something here,” Huffman said.

Once she looked, she could not get the math to add up. “The average size of the egg-laying flock in any given month of 2022 was never more than 6% lower than it was a year prior,” she wrote in a January 2023 blog post demanding government action. But egg production had fallen even less than that. So how could bird-flu-driven scarcity explain a price increase of 138%? To her, egg-price fluctuations fit an older, more human story than the “act of God-type stuff” described by one industry analyst.

In her region of Ohio, local farms once fueled the area’s commerce. Farmers supplied or ran local grocers, sold meat and vegetables to local diners and erected those once ubiquitous roadside stands. But corporate consolidation economically flattened Ohio’s farmlands and the character of its main streets.

“The bank went away in the last 10 years I’ve been here,” said Huffman. “The only thing you can buy in town now is a stamp. All that’s left is a post office and some churches.”Across rural America, that dynamic gave a few big players the power to decide what farmers paid for seeds or fertilizer or farm equipment, no matter the quality. Farmers, historically price-takers when they sold their crops, were now also price-takers whenever they needed to buy the tools of their trade.

Agricultural economists peg the peak of family farming to the 1930s, when the country had more than 6 million farmsteads and one in four Americans lived on farms. Since then, the number of farms has dropped by more than two-thirds.

Economies of scale allowed big farms to put food on the table at lower prices. And they did: Americans now spend roughly half of what they spent on food in the 1960s as a percentage of household income, a statistic that economists link to increased incomes as well as agricultural efficiencies. But as consolidation increased through the early aughts, those benefits began washing away, with savings instead captured as profit for corporate farmers and big retailers like Walmart.

“There was a prolonged period of increased efficiency in production, and because for a time it was occurring in workably competitive markets, the gains were passed upstream to farmers and downstream to consumers,” said Carstensen. “Instead of providing an advantage to the undeserving consumers and producers, the bigger companies started saying, ‘No, it’s my efficiency. I created it and I should keep the gains.’”The top four companies hold 33% of the total shell egg market, while the largest 10 hold 57%.

That level of concentration is a far cry from the beef packers — where four large companies control roughly 80% of the market — but it represents enough to create market power. As Huffman describes it, each protein has a small number of companies that dominate the market, with its own third-party benchmarking service like Urner Barry to report — and influence — pricing.

With former Missouri Lieutenant Governor Joe Maxwell, Huffman had co-founded Farm Action in 2019 frustrated by what she saw as corporate agriculture taking advantage of shoppers, farmers and — in some instances — one another. Between 2004 and 2008, major egg producers including Cal-Maine had conspired to limit supply by killing off egg-laying hens earlier than normal, an Illinois federal jury found.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Hillandale Farms allegedly price-gouged consumers, reaching a 2021 settlement with the New York attorney general’s office in which the company provided 1.2 million eggs to soup kitchens, food pantries and homeless shelters but did not have to admit guilt. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton similarly secured a gift of 2.2 million eggs as part of a settlement with Cal-Maine alleging price-gouging during the pandemic. The company did not acknowledge wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

As she watched egg prices continue to rise, Huffman commissioned Texas-based antitrust attorney Basel Musharbash to explore Big Ag’s impact on farmers and consumers across the food pyramid. Huffman hoped Musharbash’s report — ultimately published as a 206-page account called “Kings Over the Necessaries of Life” — would document the tactics that corporate food titans use to destroy smaller competition through artificially low prices or gouge consumers through high ones. He credits Huffman for drawing his attention to eggs.

“In markets that are concentrated like the egg market is, it becomes really easy to collude, and it almost becomes the default option because there’s so much upside to collusion,” Musharbash said. “If people are making profits they’ve never made before, why are we being credulous?”Huffman urged the federal government to seek out “the real culprit behind this 138% hike in the price of a carton of eggs.”She claimed that the price spike appeared “to be a collusive scheme among industry leaders to turn inflationary conditions and an avian flu outbreak into an opportunity to extract egregious profits reaching as high as 40%.”

Days after Huffman’s public request, Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, released his own letter asking for a federal “investigation into potential price gouging and other deceptive practices by the country’s largest egg companies.”By August 2024, Donald Trump was standing in front of three cartons of jumbo white eggs, part of a cornucopia of costly groceries used as a press conference backdrop at his New Jersey golf club. Trump made frustration about high prices central to his campaign for a second term, vowing on the campaign trail to make food more accessible through lower energy costs.

“A vote for Trump means your groceries will be cheaper,” he told a crowd in Pittsburgh on the eve of the election. As he prepared to take office, with egg prices approaching $5 per dozen, Trump directed incoming Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to make it her top priority. She responded by rolling out a sweeping $1 billion plan in February 2025 to target avian flu, still considered the chief culprit, through biosecurity measures and vaccine research. To boost supply, Rollins announced new egg imports and urged people to husband their own backyard flocks.

Those moves had no immediate apparent effect on prices, which hit an eye-popping $6.23 in March. In the first week of that month, Trump told Congress that “egg prices are out of control and we’re working hard to get it down” and used his social media account to distribute an op-ed by activist Charlie Kirk advising conservative readers to “Shut Up About Egg Prices — Trump Is Saving Consumers Millions.”Behind the scenes, the Trump administration was toying with another tool to address the issue: an open Justice Department file, dating from 2023, about possible cartel behavior by large egg producers.

The investigation, according to two former Biden administration officials granted anonymity to discuss nonpublic investigations, had not yet homed in on particular companies before ramping up in the fall of 2024 with new lawyers in the Chicago office focused on antitrust and agricultural markets. When Trump took power, lawyers in the Justice Department immediately identified the egg investigation as a “righteous” case they wanted to pursue.

“They reach a point where they no longer want to compete, and they’re coordinating to ensure outcomes that benefit all of them and then don’t benefit the consumer,” said Omeed Assefi, who led the egg-fixing probe as acting assistant attorney general. “It’s hard to reconcile that with capitalistic, competitive pushing.”The Trump administration “injected a lot of energy and life” into the investigation, Assefi said. On March 5, the Justice Department notified Cal-Maine, Versova and Hickman’s to preserve documents for their investigation — including, the government’s letter specified, communications with Urner Barry.

“Sometimes, as an investigator, you don’t want the market to know there is an investigation because you want the element of surprise,” said Assefi. “And sometimes, you do want them to know because you can see how they respond.”In this case, the Justice Department would allege, the response was lower prices. In April, they tumbled over a dollar to $5.12. At the White House Easter Egg Roll, Rollins bragged about a success she attributed to her department’s efforts to protect hens from bird flu. In May, prices went down further, to $4.56.

Agriculture Department spokesperson Michael Abboud said the department was “in constant communication with DOJ, FTC, [the National Economic Council], and other federal partners to protect our farmers as a matter of food security and our nation’s consumers to ensure access to the world’s most secure and affordable food supply.”An investigation that had unfolded quietly for nearly two years suddenly broke out into the open as news organizations reported on the document-preservation requests.

A month later, when Cal-Maine reported its quarterly earnings, the company disclosed it was cooperating with a Justice Department probe “into the causes behind nationwide increases in egg prices.” (Cal-Maine had previously characterized a 19% increase in its gross-profit margin as driven by what it called “strength in pricing.” When its margins in 2023 rose still further, its chief financial officer boasted of “significantly higher selling prices … another record for Cal-Maine foods.”) Trump had an ambivalent relationship with antitrust enforcement. (The White House declined to comment, referring questions to the Justice Department.)

His first picks for the Federal Trade Commission were conservatives with an anti-monopoly bent, and he tapped Gail Slater, a populist-minded tech skeptic who advised then-Senator JD Vance on policy, to run the Justice Department’s antitrust division. But he also fired the two Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission.

DOGE-led policies incentivized federal workers to leave government service, including dozens of employees in USDA tasked with enforcing agricultural antitrust laws.

At the same time, the Justice Department antitrust division that had once topped 600 attorneys was shrinking. Top officials were pushed out after internal disputes about major mergers, and in February, Slater also left. That left Assefi as acting antitrust chief, now overseeing a much smaller, 400-person division.

A small team at Trump’s Justice Department, barely 10 people, toiled to surface the facts of the alleged conspiracy for over a year. Over the course of 2025 they were joined by 17 states whose attorneys general had initiated their own investigations, in many cases pressed into service by consumer complaints, including many Democratic-led jurisdictions otherwise at odds with Trump. New York alone subpoenaed a dozen people and received 1.8 million documents as part of its investigation, uncovering evidence of what the state argued was brazen coordination among the top executives at some of the largest egg companies in the world.

“The manipulation of prices in the commodities market is not a novel concept anymore, and it is incumbent upon the department when it sees the manipulation of commodity markets to step in,” said U.S. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. in a recent interview. “And that’s what we did here.”

By mid-May, attorneys for Hickman’s — then under the ownership of Mantiqueira USA, a Brazilian-based egg company co-owned by the meat conglomerate JBS — were meeting with Assefi and other Justice Department officials to discuss a potential settlement. “This is a key tenet of this administration,” Assefi said. “You want to seek justice, you want to remedy conduct, but you don’t want to kill a company or kill an industry.”

By then, increased production had sent egg prices so low, to about $2 per dozen, that farmers were complaining they were struggling to stay in business and Cal-Maine reported a loss to investors. (The bird flu outbreak still is not over: The poultry industry has lost roughly 30 million birds since January.) On June 29, the Justice Department filed a 29-page complaint and a proposed settlement the same day. New York successfully pitched the other states on a product settlement, where free eggs are distributed in lieu of additional monetary damages.

The deal, on which the states worked closely with federal officials, would allow the companies to avoid a trial that would reveal further details about the alleged scheme — without having to admit any wrongdoing.

“When we pursue litigation, it needs to be because there is an existential threat to fair markets — and when we need to make an example of a company that is just unwilling to collaborate,” said Woodward. “The reason, in this case, not to pursue litigation is that the conduct had already been resolved, right?” he went on, referencing the decline in egg prices. So “there’s no point really putting a jury in a box and asking a jury to order them to stop doing it.”The settlement, which has not yet been approved by a court, would assess a roughly $3 million fine, paid in part by each of the three companies, and create an independent monitor to forestall their attempts at market manipulation for five years.

“A lot of these businesses are purposefully opaque, and you’re in a negotiation, and you’re tailoring the remedies you have to what you can realistically get,” said Assefi, who left the department shortly after wrapping up the egg case this summer. “And these people are well-represented, and so there’s a back-and-forth negotiation that goes over a lot of time.”

Cal-Maine acknowledged that it had been part of a “cooperative to supply eggs to customers in compliance with cage-free requirements” but “exited in May 2024, prior to and unrelated to the initiation of the DOJ’s investigation,” according to a corporate statement which said “its conduct was lawful, appropriate and in the best interest of supplying eggs to the marketplace.”“As farmers, we face extreme variability across supply and demand in dynamic and often unpredictable markets, and the ability to navigate that delicate balance is what makes farmers so valuable to U.S. food security,” company president and chief executive officer Sherman Miller said in the statement.

The settlement also requires the three companies to supply 53 million eggs to food banks across the states involved in the lawsuit. When the deal was agreed to, eggs were going for $2.14 per dozen — the lowest they had been since their late 2023 dip. The Justice Department heralded the penalty — and imposition of an independent monitor — as a bulwark against future anti-competitive activity.

“The fact of the matter,” said Woodward, “is that if we let the egg producers get away with it, you’re going to see more commodity market manipulation occurring in the markets that may have a much broader or more substantial impact on the market as a whole.”News of the settlement landed quietly. After years of media coverage that repeated the industry’s favored explanation of a flu-based shock to egg production, the news that in fact human misbehavior may have been responsible went largely ignored beyond brief attention from the business press.

The Columbus Dispatch, the nearest large newspaper to Huffman’s Ohio home, ran 24 stories between 2022 and 2026 about egg prices and avian flu. The Dispatch appears not to have run a single one about the price-fixing cartel alleged to have been actually responsible for the price shock.

Huffman read the complaint with a sense of vindication; she read the settlement with outrage. Government investigators were able to quote from the correspondence of executives trampling antitrust laws, she thought, but delivered tragically insufficient accountability for their actions.

“If you steal a truck, for example, you’re going to jail,” she said. “But then these executives were accused of taking millions of dollars out of the pockets of the American public over a period of years, and the result was just a slap on the wrist.”

The fear that Huffman and other anti-monopolists share is that companies will read the Justice Department’s pursuit of the defendants not as a cautionary tale but as a how-to manual. The high cultural salience of egg prices and the quality of investigators’ evidence created the opportunity for “a slam dunk to really do something meaningful here,” said Austin Frerick, author of a book chronicling corporate agricultural titans. But to him, the attorneys whiffed.

“The settlement was such a joke. The free egg thing just made me laugh.”Being proven right is rarely this unsatisfying. The story that had shaped a presidential election — that a series of uncontrollable factors had collided to drive up prices, and that cleaning up was a job for avian epidemiologists and farmers rather than market regulators — had been mooted by facts. The cranks who saw it all along have little to show for their vindication.

Huffman, at Farm Action, has launched a campaign encouraging public comments against the Justice Department’s proposed settlement, on which a court is poised to rule on in the coming weeks. The case might not have gone as far as needed, she argues. Two parallel class actions suits alleging that the egg industry, including Urner Barry, conspired to raise prices are now pending in federal court.

“Urner Barry is not a party to the DOJ complaint or settlement, nor has it been accused of any wrongdoing,” said a spokesperson for Urner Barry, now part of the global agrifood pricing platform Expana. “We remain committed to providing independent and rigorous reporting.”After being such a dominant object of political attention in 2024, eggs are unusually absent from this year’s midterm elections. The Trump administration is not celebrating the price decline on its watch, and even Rollins — once dubbed “the egg price-slayer” by Trump’s trade adviser — does not mention it when campaigning for Republican candidates.

It may be the affordability midterms, but there seems to be little new momentum for strengthening the type of antitrust enforcement that gave Trump’s team victory over egg-flation.

Those who rejected any possibility of price-fixing do not appear to be revising the underlying assumptions that led them to do so. Scott Lincicome, a Cato Institute economics expert, said that the federal case doesn’t undermine his think tank’s earlier skepticism that abnormally high profits were “hardly proof of any Big Egg greedflation conspiracy,” as he put it.

Egg prices economy-wide have collapsed this year, Lincicome noted. “And they’ve collapsed in a way that is almost entirely in line with a just standard supply-and-demand framework,” he said in an interview this fall. “That doesn’t mean necessarily that there wasn’t illegal behavior going on, but not economically important behavior.”The struggle to understand high food prices is shaped by a deep polarization between those who suspect the entire system is rigged and those who reflexively reject that worldview as populist crankery.

On one side an ascendant cadre of policy entrepreneurs, primarily lawyers, has dedicated its work to rooting out monopoly behavior across industries. On the other, economists — often with ties to business interests — fall back on familiar explanations for price fluctuations.

“It’s quite difficult to find an objective opinion, inasmuch as that would be possible,” said Kate Conlow, a Vanderbilt University academic fellow who authored a law review article documenting the close relationships most agricultural economists have with the industry.

Cartels are not inconceivable. One can easily envision audiences lining up to cheer George Clooney as a devious egg executive, a love-to-hate rapscallion enthralling for his shamelessness, pulling off one last heist in the food business. But our politics lacks such an imagination. Even as the cinematic details of a possible conspiracy were laid bare, government struggled to conjure accountability proportional to the scale of the alleged wrongdoing or its human impact. When daily staples move out of our economic reach, we are more comfortable believing the market’s failure to be an act of god rather than the work of man.