The Egg Cartel’s Great Egg Fixing of Egg Prices. Egg.

The Cartel Infrastructure: How They Built a Price-Fixing Machine

Five companies — Cal-Maine Foods, Rose Acre Farms, Daybreak Foods, Hillandale Farms, and Opal Foods — collectively control a massive share of the American egg market. Together with their trade association, United Egg Producers (UEP), they represent over 90% of all eggs produced in the United States. The top five producers alone account for 40% of the entire U.S. egg supply.

Beginning as late as February 1, 2022, these companies used a shared benchmark pricing platform called Urner Barry — now rebranded as Expana — to coordinate egg prices across the entire industry. Urner Barry is owned by Five Arrows, the alternative assets arm of Rothschild & Co. (a firm with over 28.2 billion Euro in assets under management). Every single trading day, Urner Barry’s staff contacts egg producers, collects their private pricing data, production volumes, bid levels, shipping dates, and supply forecasts — and feeds that intelligence back into a shared index that tells every producer exactly what every other producer is doing.

The result is that producers never need to sit in a room and agree to fix prices. The agreement is embedded in the act of feeding your confidential data into a shared system and trusting your competitors to do the same. Antitrust Professor Carstensen described it plainly: “You don’t necessarily have to sit down with the other [producers] because you know what he’s doing, he knows what you’re doing. The agreement to exchange information is what is in and of itself the source of the anticompetitive consequences.”

One Platform to Rule Them All

Cal-Maine has openly stated in Securities and Exchange Commission filings — for decades — that it prices eggs based on Urner Barry’s published market quotes. Hillandale leaned on the same fact when the New York Attorney General sued it for price-gouging during the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming it had no control over prices because Urner Barry dictated them. Daybreak’s CEO William Rehm sat on both the UEP Board of Directors and spoke at Urner Barry’s own Executive Conference. The same story plays out at every major producer: Urner Barry sets the number, everyone follows, and consumers pay the price.

Urner Barry collects non-public data through phone calls, face-to-face meetings, email, instant messaging, and fax — daily. The data includes what products are being traded, who is bidding, at what price, in what volume, for what shipping date, and how the product is packed. All of this is fed into Urner Barry’s AI-assisted forecasting platform, which the company openly markets as designed to “maximize profits” by “predicting price modes for commodity pricing.” This is the infrastructure of a cartel, operating in plain sight.

They Even Told Investors the Game Plan

In its own 2024 Annual Report filed with the SEC, Cal-Maine wrote: “We believe the majority of conventional shell eggs sold in the U.S. in the retail and foodservice channels are sold at prices that take into account, in varying ways, independently quoted wholesale market prices, such as those published by Urner Barry.” That single sentence acknowledges that the majority of America’s egg supply is priced off a single shared index — one fed by the same producers who benefit from its output. That is a cartel describing its own mechanics in a federal filing.

The Avian Flu Cover Story Doesn’t Add Up

The egg industry’s official explanation for soaring prices is simple: bird flu killed millions of hens, supply collapsed, prices rose. It is a clean story. It is also, according to the evidence in this lawsuit, a lie — or at least a profoundly misleading half-truth deployed as a shield while producers pocketed record profits.

Basic economics says that a 1% decrease in egg supply should trigger a roughly 6.6% increase in price. That’s what happened in 2015 during the last major Avian Flu outbreak. Prices went up about 7% for every 1% drop in supply — exactly what economic theory predicts. But from 2022 through 2024, a 1% decrease in egg production triggered a price increase of 17% to 33%. That is between two and five times the expected impact. Supply data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and USDA shows egg inventory in the South and Southeast remained relatively stable throughout the Class Period.

Cal-Maine’s own record is the most damning. In 2023, the company had zero Avian Flu outbreaks in its egg-laying flocks. It actually sold more eggs in 2023 than it did in 2021, the year before the bird flu was ever a factor. And yet it charged 2.8 times what it charged in 2021 for conventional eggs, and its gross profits grew by more than seven-fold in a single year. Zero bird flu. More eggs sold. Vastly higher profits. The numbers simply do not support the narrative.

The Industry Talked Itself Into Coordinated Messaging

UEP’s lobbying arm, the American Egg Board, released a statement on March 12, 2025, attributing all price volatility to bird flu, which it noted was “now in its fourth year.” UEP, which represents over 90% of American egg producers, actively promoted this talking point at every major industry conference during the Class Period. Executives from Cal-Maine, Daybreak, Opal, and others attended a string of UEP and Urner Barry conferences throughout 2022, 2023, and 2024, where Avian Flu and “managing price volatility” were primary agenda items.

Meanwhile, a competitor who played no part in the alleged conspiracy told a different story. Russell Diez-Canseco, CEO of Vital Farms, told Yahoo Finance in January 2023: “It’s a head scratcher for us. I don’t see anything in my cost structure that would have led me to raise our prices by [this much.] I can’t explain why prices have gone up as high as they have.” If bird flu were truly the cause of sky-high prices across the board, a well-run egg company competing in the same market would not describe it as a “head scratcher.”

The Non-Financial Ledger: What This Actually Cost Real People

Eggs are not a luxury item. They are the cheapest complete protein available on the American grocery shelf. They are the food that low-income families, food bank clients, nursing home residents, hospital patients, school cafeteria cooks, and people eating alone on tight budgets rely on precisely because eggs are supposed to be affordable. When a cartel of five mega-corporations quietly triples the price of that protein — using a private data platform to avoid a paper trail — the people who bear the burden are not hedge fund managers. They are people already counting every dollar.

Consider what a price jump from under $2 per dozen to $6.22 per dozen means for a family that buys four dozen eggs a month. Before the alleged conspiracy took hold, that family spent roughly $8 a month on eggs. At the peak price in March 2025, that same purchase cost $24.88 — a difference of about $17 per month, or over $200 a year. For families on SNAP benefits, for seniors on fixed Social Security incomes, for single parents working two jobs, that $200 is a utility bill. It is a co-pay. It is the difference between making rent and not. The corporations collected that money. The families lost it.

The lawsuit covers anyone in the United States who bought eggs indirectly — meaning at a grocery store, restaurant, school cafeteria, or hospital — from February 1, 2022 through today. That means the class of people harmed is effectively everyone in America who has purchased food in the last three years. The breadth of the harm is almost impossible to overstate. Plaintiffs in this case come from Washington D.C., California, New York, and Florida. They are ordinary grocery shoppers who paid the price, literally, for an alleged conspiracy they knew nothing about.

The betrayal runs deeper than the dollar amount. The egg industry spent years building a public image around phrases like “farm fresh,” “cage free,” and “American Egg Board.” It lobbied governments, funded research, and ran advertising campaigns positioning eggs as a wholesome, affordable American staple. Meanwhile, according to this complaint, industry executives were meeting at Las Vegas conferences, trading non-public pricing data through a shared platform backed by Rothschild & Co., and using bird flu as a narrative shield while their profits exploded. The public was told one story. The spreadsheets told another. That gap between the marketing story and the alleged reality is the betrayal that no settlement figure can fully account for.

Legal Receipts: They Said It Out Loud

These are direct quotes and documented statements from the source material. Read them slowly.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

Societal Impact: Who Pays the Real Price

What Now? Names, Watchlists, and the Path Forward

The Corporate Roles Behind the Alleged Cartel

• Cal-Maine Foods (NASDAQ: CALM) — Largest U.S. egg producer. Self-described “proven acquirer.” Cooperating with DOJ investigation per April 2025 Reuters reporting. CEO Sherman Miller addressed UEP competitors at January 2023 board meeting on Avian Flu.
• Rose Acre Farms — Second largest U.S. egg producer. Headquartered in Seymour, Indiana. Named in DOJ subpoena.
• Daybreak Foods — CEO William Rehm served on the UEP Board of Directors and spoke at Urner Barry Executive Conferences.
• Hillandale Farms — Sold to Global Eggs Corporation for $1.1 billion ($1.1 billion — enough to fund free eggs for 3.7 million families for a year) in March 2025, mid-investigation. Previously defended a New York AG price-gouging lawsuit by claiming it had no control over prices because Urner Barry set them.
• Opal Foods / Sparboe Farms — Internal emails from March 2020 show company president celebrating rising prices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tripled egg prices from $0.90 to $2.96 per dozen in a single month.
• Urner Barry Publications / Expana — The platform infrastructure of the alleged cartel. Owned by Five Arrows, the alternative assets arm of Rothschild & Co. Collects non-public pricing and supply data from competing producers daily and feeds it back as industry-wide pricing guidance.
• United Egg Producers (UEP) — Trade association representing 90%+ of U.S. egg producers. Actively promoted Urner Barry use among members and coordinated industry messaging on Avian Flu pricing.

Regulatory Watchlist

• U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division — Active investigation. Subpoenas issued to Cal-Maine and Rose Acre. The DOJ previously sued data aggregator Agri Stats for nearly identical conduct in the meat industry.
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — Received advocacy letters from Farm Action citing price gouging and collusion as early as January 2023.
• State Attorneys General — New York, Minnesota, and Texas have all previously taken action against egg producers named in this complaint. More states may join.
• U.S. Senate / Congress — Senators Jack Reed and Elizabeth Warren, plus over a dozen members of Congress, have already written letters demanding federal action.
• USDA — Has published documentation confirming it is illegal for agricultural cooperatives to restrain members’ production, directly undermining any Capper-Volstead immunity defense.

What You Can Do

If you bought eggs in the United States after February 1, 2022, you are a potential class member. Track the progress of this lawsuit. Contact your state attorney general. Support food banks and mutual aid networks that have been absorbing the cost of this alleged cartel through donated eggs and emergency food distributions. Local food sovereignty organizations, community gardens, and urban farming cooperatives are direct infrastructure for building food systems that cartel actors cannot touch. The most powerful long-term answer to corporate food monopolies is community food independence — people growing, sharing, and distributing food outside the control of five vertically integrated mega-corporations and the Rothschild-backed data platform that allegedly coordinates their pricing.