Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-07
Source: The Conversation – in French– By François Lévêque, Professor of Economics, Mines Paris – PSL
Basic products, eggs are increasingly missing from the shelves. How are these shortages explained? How is the price of eggs formed?
As every year at Easter, chocolate eggs have flooded the shop windows. At the same time, real pearly white eggs occasionally run out in supermarket aisles.
What if the egg became scarce? As if the laying hens were on strike and slowing down production. Enough to seriously disrupt our established eating habits.237 eggs per personIn France in 2025, whether they are eaten hard (with or without mayonnaise), fried, in an omelette, or in pastries, pasta, and various industrial recipes.
National consumption is growing even though the French prefer eggs to poultry farms. The current tension in the market should therefore persist.
A high risk of an epidemic
The risk of scarcity is primarily linked to avian influenza (AI), a form of flu. Highly pathogenic, the AI virus leads to drastic culling of infected flocks. In 2022 in the United States,15% of the livestock went through there. Today, in France, the epizootic already has numerous outbreaks. The risk was recently raisedat the highest level by the Ministry of Agriculture.
Another cause of rarity, but to a lesser extent: the heat. The hens are disturbed by heatwaves. Theylay fewer eggs, smaller and with ashell more fragile, because thinner. Like humans, they also die from it.
The virtues of the egg
However, it is quite annoying when the egg starts to run out. The French who eat them are quite right, because the egg is rich in proteins, essential amino acids, antioxidants, and trace elements while being low in calories, easy to cook, and affordable for all budgets (less than 40 cents each). As for its contribution to cholesterol harmful to health, it isof an unfounded belief.
Also to read:
The egg or the chicken, which came first?
What will happen if the scarcity of eggs spreads and increases? Its price should naturally rise. In the United States, the increase has been such that it has become a subject of political controversy. True to himself, Donald Trump, barely settled in his presidential chair, seized the issue to attack Joe Biden and falsely boast.having lowered its price by 95%in a few weeks.
More seriously, let’s examine what determines the price of eggs, including, among other things, the behaviors and preferences of consumers for this food as well as the breeding conditions of laying hens. In short, without seeming to, I’m offering you a little economics lesson.
The price of the egg, a question of supply and demand
If fewer eggs are produced, their price will mechanically rise. There’s no need to plot graphs for this. It’s like fuel at the pump when traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is blocked. The price rises all the more strongly because the egg is almost as essential as oil. What else could replace it on the plate and in cakes? Other sources of animal protein are much more expensive. With lentils or other plant sources? But well, a silken tofu omelette doesn’t quite have the same flavor and consistency. For baking, flax seeds, mashed banana, or starch are a last resort. That said, vegan cooking has becomevery elaborate and rich in recipes allowing to replace eggs.
As a result, due to the lack of obvious substitutes, consumers respond little to price variations. A quantified estimate gives adecrease in egg purchases of only 15% in case of doubling its price. Or, conversely, if the quantity available for sale decreases by 1%, the price increases by 6 to 7 %.
In the short term, poultry farmers also react little to price increases. They cannot suddenly produce more to sell more. Buying and raising more female chicks is useless to them because a hen will only lay her first eggs at the age of 5 to 6 months. However, a high price, especially linked to a shortage, facilitates the long-term restocking of the flock and encourages farmers to invest in new facilities.
This makes it clear why – besides making egg cartons scarce on the shelves – a momentary drop in production due to avian flu or a heatwave drives up the price, but that after some time the shortage ends and the price goes back down.
The price evolution of the egg depends on supply and demand. But also on the cost of production.
The price of animal welfare
Trending, the cost increases for a good cause, that of animal welfare. In France, in hatcheries, the brothers of laying hens, in other words male chicks, are no longer crushed or gassed at birth. The sex of the chicks is now determined in the egg, most often by imaging. It is detected if the color of the embryonic down is white. If so, it is a male embryo and the egg is destroyed. In-ovo sexing, which has become mandatory, hasdoubled the cost of the chick delivered to the poultry farmers.
Another significant progress is that the laying hen lives better. Cage farming is declining. More than half of the hensnow benefit from external access. Obviously with certain constraints of crowding: no more than 500 hens per hectare for eggs labeled organic, but a threshold five times higherfor eggs labeled “free range”. More costly, these breeding conditions result in higher prices. Count on €1.50 for a box of six eggs from cage farming, €2 for free-range farming, and €3 for organic.
A lack of French eggs?
Everything would therefore be for the best in the best of all henhouses, except that, faced with dynamic consumption, thenational production is struggling to keep up.
For about fifteen years, French annual production has been almost stable, trending around 16 billion eggs, while demand is increasing, both for shell eggs consumed by households and for processed eggs (liquid yolks and whites, egg powder, peeled hard-boiled eggs, etc.). Consequently, imports are rising. They remain modest (10% of consumption in 2025), but this may not last.
Indeed, the profession believes that it would be necessary to increase theproduction capacity of 20% in ten years, which involves the construction of several hundred chicken coops. However, only 18 were built last year… The current tension in the market is not about to disappear.
Neighborhood opposition to new installations is strong. Even more so for outdoor farming, as they are more visible and occupy a larger area. This local resistance to chicken coops leads to a cascade of unwelcome effects suffered by others. More imports mean more chicks and hens less well cared for elsewhere. France is the undisputed champion ofthe abandonment of grinding the former and the reduction of cage confinement of the latter.
Eggs yes, but no chicken coops
More imports also mean a lower average quality of eggs for consumers due to less strict and less controlled health requirements abroad. More imports finally mean increased pressure on the margin and income of poultry farmers, as imported eggs are cheaper. In summary, the “Not in my backyard” movement (Not In My Backyard) which opposes the installations of laying hens presents the risk of weakening an evolution that has so far been rather successful and welcome. Even if everything is not rosy in the henhouses and for poultry farmers in mainland France, I would be tempted to crow cocorico!
To contain imports, one cannot count on a considerable rise in raising laying hens in one’s own garden. A selected laying hen can layup to 300 eggs per year. So, to achieve complete domestic self-sufficiency, one to two hens will be necessary depending on the size of the household and the appetite of its members for eggs.
Self-sufficiency livestock farming has become trendy, but only for a very small part of the population. If you are among them,you can even adopta spent hen, which would otherwise have been slaughtered young, as age slows down the laying rate. Furthermore, if you only have a balcony, avoid starting: your neighbors will complain about the nuisance and the animal will live very poorly on a hard surface.
Good timing and other mysteries
Let’s finish with advice useful to most people. How to peel a hard-boiled egg more easily? There is nothing more unpleasant than getting a grainy and ugly egg because the shell sticks to the white. Avoid fresh eggs above all. Moreover, for fried or soft-boiled eggs, prefer eggs less than ten days after laying; they will be better. You will find other instructions for asuccessful scrutiny in a recent article published inThe Conversation.
How to properly crack an egg? To avoid shell fragments in your preparation and having to remove them one by one with difficulty. Do not break the egg against the edge of a pan or a bowl. Tap it firmly against a flat surface.
How to make a mayo egg? Buy the recipe book from bistro owners and activist restaurateurs ofthe Association for the Preservation of the Mayonnaise Egg. And choose one of the 49 preparations offered there by great chefs.
How to cook an egg? For those who don’t know: three minutes at 100 °C for a soft-boiled egg and twice as long for a hard-boiled egg at the same temperature. More complicated: one hour at 65 °C for a perfect egg. But it is only perfect in name. The yolk is optimally cooked, but not the white, because the temperature is too low for the proteins in the albumen to coagulate.To achieve true perfection in terms of taste and dietetics of Italian chemists and physicistsrecommend cooking with two pots, one of boiling water, the other at 30°C, and transferring the egg from one container to the other every two minutes.
Perfection has a price, or rather a cost. Instead of concluding with this alexandrine, let us end with the wish for an Eastertime without scarcity for this exceptional food.
François Lévêque does not work for, advise, own shares in, or receive funding from any organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no affiliation other than his research institution.
–ref. Should we fear a lasting egg shortage?https://theconversation.com/should-we-fear-a-lasting-egg-shortage-278716