By Sydney Maki
Bloomberg
It doesn’t matter if you like them hard-boiled, scrambled or soaked in heart-clogging hollandaise sauce: when eggs are this cheap, it’s a good time to get cracking.
Supplies in the U.S. have surged so much in recent months that prices are the lowest for this time of year in at least a decade. It will probably take a while for consumers to eat through the surplus inventory, so the government is predicting egg costs will drop more than any other food group in 2017.
The slump marks a sharp turnaround in the egg business. In 2015, an avian influenza outbreak forced farmers to destroy millions of birds and prices skyrocketed. Eager to take advantage of the rally, producers expanded flocks that were the biggest ever by the end of last year. But demand hasn’t kept pace. While some farms have scaled back in recent months, hens have gotten more productive, keeping the market flush with supply.“The market was temporarily starved for eggs, and now it’s drowning,” said Tom Elam, president of Carmel, Indiana-based consulting firm FarmEcon. “There’s just too many eggs out there.”
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