Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-01
Source: The Conversation – in French– By François Lévêque, Professor of Economics, Mines Paris – PSL
Staple products, eggs are increasingly missing from the shelves. How are these shortages explained? How is the price of eggs determined?
As every year at Easter, chocolate eggs have taken over the shop windows. At the same time, real pearly white eggs are occasionally missing from supermarket shelves.
What if the egg became scarce? As if laying hens went on strike and slowed down the pace. Enough to seriously disrupt our established eating habit at237 eggs per personin France in 2025, whether they are eaten hard (with or without mayonnaise), fried, in an omelette or even in pastries, pasta and various industrial recipes.
National consumption is increasing even though the French prefer eggs to poultry farms. The current tension on the market should therefore persist.
A high risk of epidemic
The risk of scarcity is primarily linked to avian influenza (AI), a form of flu. Highly pathogenic, the AI virus leads to the drastic culling of contaminated livestock. In 2022 in the United States,15% of the livestock passed there. Today, in France, the epizootic already has many outbreaks. The risk has recently been raisedat the high level by the Ministry of Agriculture.
Another cause of rarity, but to a lesser extent: the heat. The hens are disturbed by the heatwaves. Theylay fewer eggs, smaller and with ashell more fragile, because thinner. Like humans, they die from it too.
The virtues of the egg
Now, it’s really annoying when the egg runs 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 of 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 intensifies? 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 into 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 and therefore, among other things, the behaviors and preferences of consumers for this food as well as the rearing conditions of laying hens. In short, without seeming to, I offer 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. No need to plot curves for that. It’s like fuel at the pump when traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is blocked. The price rises all the more sharply because the egg is almost as indispensable as oil. What else could you replace it with on the plate and in cakes? Other sources of animal protein are much more expensive. With lentils or other plant-based 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 makeshift solution. 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 quantitative 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 respond 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 lay her first eggs only when she is 5 to 6 months old. However, a high price, especially linked to a shortage, facilitates the eventual rebuilding of the flock and encourages farmers to invest in new facilities.
This explains why — aside from making egg cartons scarce on the shelves — a temporary drop in production due to avian flu or a heatwave drives prices up, but that after a little time the shortage ends and prices fall again.
The evolution of the egg price depends on supply and demand. But also on the cost of production.
The price of animal welfare
As a trend, 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 inside the egg, most often by imaging. It is detected if the color of the embryonic down is white. If yes, it is a male embryo and the egg is destroyed. Sexing of eggs, now mandatory, hasdoubled the cost of the chick delivered to poultry farmers.
Another notable progress is that the laying hen lives better. Cage farming is declining. More than half of the hensnow benefit from external access. Obviously with some crowding constraints: no more than 500 hens per hectare for eggs labeled organic, but a threshold five times higherfor eggs labeled “free range”. More costly, these farming conditions result in higher prices. Expect to pay €1.5 for a box of six eggs from cage farming, €2 for free-range farming, and €3 for organic.
A shortage of French eggs?
So everything would be for the best in the best of all possible chicken coops, except that, faced with dynamic consumption, thenational production is struggling to keep up.
For about fifteen years, annual French production has been nearly stable, trending around 16 billion eggs, while demand is growing, both for so-called shell eggs from households and for processed eggs consumed (liquid yolks and whites, egg powder, peeled hard-boiled eggs, etc.). As a result, imports are increasing. They remain modest (10% of consumption in 2025), but this may not last.
Indeed, the profession believes that it would be necessary to increase the20% production capacity in ten years, which implies the construction of several hundred chicken coops. Yet, only 18 were built last year… The current market tension is not going away anytime soon.
Neighborhood opposition to new installations is strong. Even more so for outdoor livestock farms, as they are more visible and occupy a larger area. This local resistance to chicken coops causes a cascade of unfortunate effects suffered by others. More imports mean more chicks and hens less well off elsewhere. France is the undisputed champion ofthe abandonment of crushing the former and reducing the caging 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 installation of laying hens presents the risk of weakening an evolution so far rather successful and welcome. Even if not everything is perfect in the henhouses and for the poultry farmers of France, I would be tempted to crow cock-a-doodle-doo!
To contain imports, one cannot rely on a considerable boom in laying hen farming in one’s own garden. A selected laying hen can layup to 300 eggs per year. Therefore, 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 farming has become trendy, but only for a very small part of the population. If you are among them,you can even adopta retired hen, which would otherwise have been slaughtered young, as age slows down the laying rate. Moreover, if you only have a balcony, avoid starting: your neighbors will complain about the nuisances and the animal will cope very poorly on a hard floor.
Good timing and other mysteries
Let’s end with some advice more useful to the general public. How to peel a hard-boiled egg more easily? Nothing is 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 old after laying, they will be better. You will find other instructions for asuccessful peeling in a recent article published inThe Conversation.
How to break an egg cleanly? To avoid shell fragments in your preparation and the need to remove them one by one with difficulty. Do not break the egg against the edge of a pan or bowl. Tap it firmly against a flat surface.
How to make an egg mayo? Buy the recipe book from the activist bistro owners and restaurateurs ofthe Association for the Preservation of the Egg Mayonnaise. And choose one of the 49 preparations offered there by great chefs.
How to cook an egg? For those who don’t know: six minutes at 100 °C for a soft-boiled egg and twice that for a hard-boiled egg at the same temperature. More complicated: one hour at 65 °C for the perfect egg. But it is perfect in name only. The yolk is optimally cooked, but not the white, because the temperature is too low for the albumen proteins to coagulate.To achieve true perfection in taste and dietary aspects, 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 Easter time without shortage for this exceptional food.
François Lévêque does not work for, advise, own shares in, or receive funds from any organization that might benefit from this article, and has declared no affiliation other than his research institution.
–ref. Will there be eggs for Easter? And at what price? –https://theconversation.com/will-there-be-easter-eggs-and-at-what-price-278716