Inside the Egg Price-Fixing Scandal That Spiked American Grocery Bills
Executive texts and emails show effort to sway market, Justice Department says; ‘bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often’
On Dec. 19, 2022, executives from America’s three biggest egg producers got on a call. The subject: how to keep the price of eggs high.
With Christmas a few days away, the chief executive of Arizona-based Hickman’s Egg Ranch had an idea for how to push an industry benchmark for eggs higher, according to the Justice Department.
If Hickman’s and other big egg companies all bid aggressively for eggs on a wholesale market exchange, they could raise a key pricing measure that influences the prices shoppers pay in grocery stores.
“As a group we need to bid like they vote in Chicago, early and often,” an alleged co-conspirator said, according to a federal court complaint made public this week.
The complaint, filed in Iowa federal court, described a yearslong effort by a handful of major egg producers to manipulate a little-known process that helps determine what Americans pay for eggs. From 2022 to 2025, antitrust enforcers said, executives of [Cal-Maine Foods], Hickman’s and Versova spoke by phone and exchanged messages to coordinate bids and trading.
The effort occurred during a period when eggs were scarce, consumers paid more for cartons than ever before, and President Trump raised the issue on the campaign trail. Egg producers have blamed a historic avian flu outbreak that decimated the hen population.
I recall this being a huge campaign issue because…inflation.
Still, they all got caught. So how much trouble are they in? Well according to the settlement, the egg producers must pay in aggregate $3 million in penalties, must donate 53 million eggs to food banks, and can no longer fix prices. Cal-Maine was the ringleader here - it had to donate 30 million eggs, Versova gave 20 million, and Centrum donated 3 million.
Is that enough? Well, let’s start with a very basic concern. If you’re looking at some of these clear emails and texts and wondering why there’s no criminal charge for price-fixing, you’re not alone. Most antitrust lawyers I know are mocking this settlement as a farce, since it looks so obviously like criminal behavior but instead ended up with a no-admit/no-deny parking ticket. But let’s put that aside, and just look at the cost/benefit. Cal-Maine has to pay $1.5 million, let’s throw in another $1.5 million to cover the cost of the 30 million eggs they had to donate. That means they are out $3 million, for a scheme that netted them more than $3 billion. That’s a thousand-fold return.
$3 million a cost of doing business fine.
This type of criminality will not stop unless some CEOs go to jail.