Why Canada is safe, for now, from very high egg prices

Canadians have so far been shielded from the high egg price plaguing the U.S. in the midst of an avian flu outbreak, and industry experts say it’s likely to stay that way for now.

The U.S. diner chain Waffle House, known for its low prices, said Tuesday it would add a 50-cent surcharge for every egg in a customer’s order due to a dramatic uptick in prices.

The price of wholesale eggs in the U.S. hit an all-time high in December, with a dozen going for $5.57 US in the Midwest and $8.85 US in California, according to the commodity data firm Expana.

Americans have been posting photos of eggs on shelves, in some cases reaching double-digit retail prices per dozen, and comparing them to lower Canadian prices, though prices vary by store and region in both countries.

The jump has been mostly blamed on the avian flu. The virus wiped out more than 20 million chickens in the U.S. last quarter, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the highest toll since the outbreak started in 2022.

The USDA, which says egg prices are the most volatile category it tracks, projects those prices will continue rising (new window) in 2025.

Canada well protected

Bruce Muirhead, the Egg Farmers of Canada public policy chair and a professor at the University of Waterloo, says Canada will probably not see a similar spike, due to its smaller farms and resilient supply management system.

It seems to me, with Canadian farms, we are well protected against the worst effects of avian influenza, he said. He says U.S. agribusiness has no resemblance to Canada’s egg farms, which have an average of 25,000 laying hens per farm.

In the U.S., farms run by mega-producers like Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms can have several million laying hens.

If a wild bird infected with avian flu lands on a farm and infects a hen, the whole flock has to be euthanized because the disease spreads so quickly. Avian flu has a 90 to 100 per cent mortality rate in chickens, and they usually die within 48 hours, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (new window).

It’s an incredibly communicable disease. So it has become a really, really significant and problematic issue, Muirhead said.

On a farm with six million birds, he says, killing them would eliminate about four million eggs per day from the market.

Those numbers are really cataclysmic.

WATCH | B.C. farms face avian flu:

Avian flu threatening B.C. poultry farms

Close to 80 poultry farms in B.C. have experienced avian flu outbreaks since the middle of October, according to the B.C. Poultry Association.

Once the birds are culled, the bodies have to be disposed of and the barns disinfected before the farm can restock with hens and resume full production, a process Muirhead says can take months.

The more competitive, go big or go home egg industry in the U.S. is intended to make egg production cheaper, so in good times it can sell to customers for less, he says. But when bird flu strikes — which has become increasingly common over the past decade — consumers have little protection from sharp price jumps.

‘We need to be vigilant’

According to Statistics Canada (new window), the average retail price for a dozen eggs in Canada was $4.74 Cdn in July 2024, and had gone up to $4.85 by November.

The supply management system, established in 1972, allows collaboration to make sure farmers hit production targets and that production is spread out across the country, says Tyler McCann, managing director of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute. Crucially, he says, it also makes it easier for farmers to work together on disease response.

But Canada is still seeing more bird flu cases across the country, and McCann says it’s putting a strain on egg farmers here as well.

Canadians should understand that this is a risk that farmers are grappling with, and we need to be vigilant and understand that it’s an ongoing challenge to make sure that we don’t run into the same issues around skyrocketing egg prices, he said.

McCann says the industry is facing other pressures, such as increasing production costs, that he expects will drive prices up gradually over time, even though he doesn’t expect a spike like what’s happening in the U.S.

High food prices, of eggs in particular, were a hot topic during last year’s U.S. presidential election and the Trump administration has blamed the still-high prices on former president Joe Biden’s policies.

Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week the USDA, under Biden, had caused an egg shortage by ordering the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens — but did not mention this was to stop the spread of avian flu, per the department’s long-standing policy.

It’s a bit of a mind-boggling comment for those of us that are in the sector, because ordering those birds destroyed is a really important part in disease control measures, McCann said.

If we start to see the Americans or others take their foot off the gas of disease control and response measures, that’s really bad news for everybody. We don’t want to let this avian influenza get out of control. Because that does put extra pressure on prices that consumers will see.

This article is republished from RCI.