Berdia Kinney, also at Costco, said she hasn’t experienced problems getting enough eggs. She boils half the eggs she buys and uses the rest in a month. Kinney thinks there wouldn’t be an egg shortage if people didn’t start panic-buying and hoarding them.
“If you’re not using all of them, they’re gonna go bad, so you’re wasting your time,” Kinney said. “Just don’t hoard from everybody else, just like they did with toilet paper during COVID.”
Around the nation, egg prices are eggsacerbating and millions of chickens are being killed due to avian influenza, or bird flu. However, in Washington, growers say the shortage isn’t due to the bird flu or a supply shortage, but by the public scrambling to buy eggs.
A 2019 law requiring all eggs sold in Washington to be cage-free came into effect in January 2024, but Spokane newsweekly The Inlander reported last year that the avian flu, inflation increasing labor and materials prices and the rising demand for eggs were also factors in last year’s rising egg prices.
Egg farmer Brent Wilcox has farms in Washington, Oregon and Montana, so most of his company’s eggs don’t travel very far. Wilcox eggs can be found at Costco, Safeway, Fred Meyer, QFC, PCC and other smaller grocery stores.
“It’s just impossible to meet the orders because we just don’t have the resources to double, triple or quadruple, as you can imagine,” Wilcox said. Their finite supply of eggs can’t catch up to the increased demand.
He said that with animals, you can’t just ramp up production one day. In the egg industry, growth is time-consuming and expensive.
To increase the egg supply, farmers need to order new baby chicks to arrive the following year and build new poultry houses while they wait. Then they need to implement “pulling capacity,” the process of raising a baby chick from one day old to 20 weeks.
After hens reach 20 weeks, they need a separate facility to lay eggs. Wilcox said they’re placing orders for 2026 to expand their farms, but that it will take time to grow their egg production.
“When we started seeing this demand thing kind of going crazy, we had people just offering us, ‘I’ll take a truckload of eggs a week and I’ll pay you whatever you want.’ We just said, ‘We’re not going to play those games. We’re in this for the long haul,’” Wilcox said.
They hatched an idea to limit how many cartons customers could buy, but decided against it after learning that limits would actually encourage people to buy more.
However, some stores have taken to rationing. Some Costco and Trader Joe’s locations have implemented limits on eggs since the shortage began. Although people have tried to sneak in an extra carton or two, workers at the register will remind customers of the limit and put eggs back.
“We have basically told our customers, we are going to continue to build the future and provide more eggs, but it’s not something we can do overnight,” Wilcox said.
None of Wilcox’s farms have contracted the bird flu, but unfortunately some of the partner farms the company trades eggs with have contracted the virus.
Wilcox said that to shield their chickens from the flu, they have ramped up their biohazard protocols. Employees are required to start their work day by parking in specific areas outside of the farm. Workers then have to take showers when they get to work and change their clothing in each poultry house to avoid introducing any bird flu virus from the outside. This clothing then stays inside the poultry house when the employees are done for the day.
The company also uses lasers and trained dogs to keep wild birds away. When it’s time to transport the eggs, they’re loaded onto the Wilcox trucking fleet, which go through a truck wash prior to loading.
Another challenge Wilcox said their company is going through is their loss of insurance. Under their current insurance company, they had bird-flu coverage, but the company was recently told their coverage was canceled for this year.
“They’re dropping policies to every poultry farm in the country,” Wilcox said. The company looked for other insurance companies, but ultimately Wilcox had to create its own rainy-day fund since no insurance companies would cover them.
Other small, local egg farms in Washington said the current shortage has had some benefits for them, as customers have come out of their shell to explore new sources for eggs.
Luke Ruggenberg, a farm market manager at 21 Acres, said that since the beginning of this year, they’ve been gradually selling more eggs than in previous years.
21 Acres is a nonprofit farm market and education center that works with local farmers and food-access partners year-round to support a local sustainable food system by distributing produce from local farms and shelf-stable goods.
“We’re seeing that people are seeking us out as an alternative, and we’re using that as a point to educate people on how important our local food system is as a food safety net,” Ruggenberg said.
Their farm and market are located in Woodinville and they receive local produce from farms in Snohomish Valley, Redmond and Eatonville. Their produce can also be found at Puget Sound Food Hub and Farmstand Local Foods. 21 Acres’ eggs are sourced from farms in Redmond and near Mount Rainier.
“We’ve been able to keep our supply pretty steady; that being said, we are still selling out every week because of the higher demand, and we can’t get more from most of our farms [since] they have a limited amount to offer,” said Ruggenberg.
He said small and midsize farms are not experiencing the same fear of avian flu because they don’t have as many animals concentrated in one area. Ruggenberg said he hasn’t heard from any of their farm partners that they’ve contracted it.
At the moment, 21 Acres is partnered with two farms for eggs, and are trying to find more to supplement their stock. 21 Acres typically orders 54 dozen eggs from one farm per week, and averages 70 to 80 dozen eggs per week total. The organization allows customers to buy eggs by the normal dozen or in bulk, when people can fill a carton with as many as they want.
21 Acres’ eggs from pastured chickens cost $7.25 to $9.25 per dozen, with newer partner farms selling eggs for $10.75 per dozen. Farmers set the egg prices.
“These are really good, bright-yellow, bright-orange yolks. You can taste the quality of them,” Ruggenberg said. “There’s always an opportunity to raise our prices a lot; people are willing to pay a lot for them but that’s not what we’re interested in doing at all.”
Some of their other products are more expensive than those offered by larger companies, but Ruggenberg said these prices accurately represent what it takes to sustain local farming.
Ruggenberg said bigger companies can deflate their prices due to subsidies, tax breaks and practices that are not as environmentally sustainable, among other things; however, local farmers can’t do the same.
Ruggenberg says that more government policy changes and funding from different sources can help improve access to local produce and allow the public to buy their food from multiple sources – in other words, to not put all their eggs in one basket.
“We’re kind of seeing what happens when the playing field is leveled a bit by some of the big producers who have been able to drive down costs for so long [but] who are now brought up to the same level of what it actually costs to produce food,” Ruggenberg said.
