Egg prices are reportedly expected to soar throughout the year, even though Vice President JD Vance recently said otherwise. The prices of eggs are predicted to increase about 20% in 2025, compared to about 2.2% for overall food prices, as revealed by the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) price outlook. The USDA has said the reason for the soaring prices is the highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu, outbreak, which caused a strain in supply.
What did JD Vance say?
Vance recently said during an interview on CBS News’ Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan that gas and grocery prices are expected to come down at some point. “Prices are going to come down, but it’s going to take a little bit of time,” Vance told Brennan. “The president has been president for all of five days. I think that in those five days, he’s accomplished more than Joe Biden did in four years.”
Vance also said that many of the executive orders that president Donald Trump signed will help bring down prices, and added that they “have caused, already, jobs to start coming back into our country, which is a core part of lowering prices.” “More capital investment, more job creation in our economy, is one of the things that’s going to drive down prices for all consumers, but also raise wages so that people can afford to buy the things that they need,” Vance said.
On January 3, the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) reported that grocery stores were seeing record-high prices in retail markets across the nation because of the “significant outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in commercial table egg layer flocks through December.” The virus had, in fact, affected over 136 million poultry across 50 US states by January 17 since January 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Consumers might see a huge jump in egg prices from December. The average price of a dozen large, grade-A eggs was $4.15 in December, which was up from $3.65 in November, the Bureau of Labor Statistics states. The Consumer Price Index says that the cost of eggs rose more than 36% year-over-year in December.
It is unclear when egg prices will come down again, but what will determine the downward trend is how long it takes farmers and producers to recover their stocks of healthy laying hens. “No one can predict the future, but bird flu remains an ongoing threat to our egg farms, and egg farmers are working around the clock to protect their birds, replenish supply and keep those eggs coming,” Emily Metz, president and CEO of the American Egg Board, told USA TODAY this month.
