When Ashlee Millin opened her Eagle River brunch restaurant, the Toad in the Hole, two years ago, she was dealing with high egg prices then, also because of bird flu.
She was paying $95 per case, which is 15 dozen. Things stabilized about six months later and the price for a case dropped to about $15.
The central Wisconsin supplier Millin has been using for eggs has been able to keep prices fairly stable.
“Their egg prices are kind of unaffected by it because they're smaller. It's an Amish farm, so their prices are based off of the feed they actually get, instead of just like the fluctuation of the market all the time, which you could argue that they're a little more expensive, but they're stable,” said Millin.
But when that supplier had to pause egg production, for reasons unrelated to bird flu, Millin had to switch producers temporarily.
“Then when bird flu hit this like past couple weeks, they went from $45 a case to $120 a case in probably two/three weeks,” said Millin.
Toad in the Hole is a small restaurant with eggs used for most of the menu items. Millin says she goes through about 700 to 800 each week.
If Millin’s normal producer didn’t start supplying eggs again, she was going to change prices.
“I'm pretty good with our pricing and all that, so I keep it as fair as I can. But if things change, you know, we will change accordingly,” said Millin.
She’s not the only small business that’s been hesitant to raise prices because of the cost of eggs.
Kathleen Regelman, the owner of Kreger’s Bakery, told WAOW she didn’t want to increase prices more after having already raised them in the last couple of years because of inflation.
Instead, she’s cut back or eliminated some products.
“It forced us to make some tough decisions,” she told WAOW.
These businesses likely won’t see relief anytime soon.
This bird flu appears to have a greater impact on egg laying hens.
According to the USDA, more than 38 million egg laying hens in the U.S. were lost due to bird flu last year. More than 73,000 poultry in four counties in Wisconsin were among them.
UW Extension Poultry Specialist Ron Kean says it will take a year or more to get egg production back to what it used to be.
When bird flu is detected on a farm, all the chickens have to be euthanized.
But before farms can start rebuilding their flocks, Kean says bird flu needs to get under control.
“That doesn't seem to be happening. I think there's a lot of discussion about potential ways to stop this disease. There's discussion of vaccination methods and whether that would work. Currently, that's not allowed,” said Kean. “The first step is really getting a handle on the disease and stopping it.”
Kean thinks prices may drop some as we get closer to summer and the demand tends to go down, but he expects egg costs to remain high for quite a while.
“There's a shortage of hatching eggs and a shortage of chicks, because we've lost so many,” said Kean. “Even if [a farm is] all clean and ready to go, it's hard to find new chicks to come back to bring back in.”
Egg prices rose nearly 37% last year. The average price of eggs in the U.S. is now more than $4 a dozen.
