The good news on eggs is real. A dozen large eggs has fallen to about 2.19 dollars, down from a record 6.23 dollars in March 2025 [1]. The coverage that greets the relief tells the price story as a cycle of nature: bird flu killed hens, supply crashed, prices soared, flocks recovered, prices fell. That story is not wrong. It is incomplete, and the missing piece landed in court in late June.
On June 30, the Justice Department and 17 state attorneys general announced a settlement with three of the largest egg producers, Cal-Maine Foods, Hickman's Egg Ranch, and Versova [1][3]. The allegation was not bird flu. It was that the companies secretly coordinated to manipulate the daily Urner Barry price quote, the benchmark that egg supply contracts across the country are written against, inflating prices from June 2022 through March 2025 [1] - the same window in which shoppers watched a carton double and double again.
The accounting for that is modest. The producers will pay 3.3 million dollars to the states and donate about 53 million eggs to food banks, and they admitted no wrongdoing [2]. Cal-Maine called the allegations baseless. The settlement still needs a court's approval [3]. Set the penalty next to two years of record prices across tens of millions of households and the size of it speaks for itself.
None of this means bird flu was not a real factor; it was. The point is narrower and it is the reader's due: last year's record egg prices are being remembered as a weather event, and the government's own case says part of the story was coordination. A relief piece that celebrates cheap eggs without mentioning the settlement over the expensive ones leaves out who, besides the hens, may have had a hand in the price.
