Over $70,000 per year for eggs: how price increases are hurting small businesses

Over the past 130 years, four generations of Ernest Repore’s families have baked pastries such as Cream Puff, Cannoli and Sfogliatell, which have come to define Manhattan’s Little Italy district.

However, the sudden rise in egg costs – the ingredients for nearly half the product’s staple food – it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Ferrara Bakeries to avoid price hikes.

“We can’t pass costs to our guests,” Ferrara president Ernest Repore told ABC News. “As we get closer to Easter, the prices of eggs are growing exponentially. I can’t do anything about it.”

Egg prices skyrocketed last year, reaching historic highs, with wholesale shoppers like small businesses paying more than $8 for a dozen eggs last week. According to the latest USDA report released Friday, the national average wholesale price fell to $6.85 per dozen.

However, many grocery stores sell eggs and put customers at the door to sell them, bringing the average retail price of a dozen eggs to just under $5. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of 12 eggs at grocery stores reached a record high of 4.95 in January 2025. Additionally, the USDA could see prices rise 40% this year, with experts warning that prices will be high even if US egg supply rebound.

However, unlike grocery shoppers, small businesses are tied to wholesale prices in the market, and these surged costs are particularly devastating.

Theodore Caronos, owner of Square Diner in Downtown New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, said the additional costs of his annual fees would lead to tens of thousands of dollars.

“If things are kept up at this price and are as busy as last year, you’ll pay $70,000 more for eggs than last year,” he told ABC News. “We won’t be able to absorb that hit for the next nine months.”

The outrageous costs are the result of a nationwide shock to supply brought about by the devastated outbreak of avian flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 166 million commercial poultry birds have been affected since 2022, when the outbreak began. However, the past few months have been particularly devastating.

“In just four months, we lost 52 million layers and ditches within the country’s egg supply, which is very different from any other outbreak we’ve seen in the past,” Karyn Rispoli, editor of Expana, a company that researches and tracks egg prices, told ABC News. “The biggest difference these days is that it’s even more deadly and really devastated the egg supply of our country.”

Avian flu has wreaked havoc in poultry flocks across the country. As a result, Rispoli says that the country’s supply of egg-soaked chickens is the lowest in almost ten years. Once a single chicken is infected, the farmer is forced to cull the rest, and then the challenge arises of re-embed the flock.

However, despite the US facing an egg shortage, demand for products remains relatively constant, creating the perfect storm for egg prices to rise. As a result, small businesses relying on eggs like Ferrara Bakery and Square Diners are forced to make difficult decisions.

Unlike larger restaurant chains like Denny’s and Waffle House, which adapted to the surge in costs by adding an extra egg to the price of menu items, according to Bruce Sacerdote, professor of Dartmouth College Economics.

“In the case of restaurants, they don’t necessarily take over the entire price increase. We’re not talking about simple items where the market is clear right away and you need to take over the full price increase,” he told ABC News. “Restaurants may be taking a blow to their margins to avoid passing on the full price increase.”

Tom’s restaurant on New York City’s Upper West Side is famous for setting the fictional monk cafe for the television series “Seinfeld.” The rising egg prices mean that co-owner John Aielomonahos is spending an additional $2,000 a week to pay for the eggs to continue supplying the restaurant.

“Of course, we don’t want to charge customers extra fees,” Ieromonahos said. “This is not our customers’ fault, but we don’t know how long it will last without extra charging.”

At a Hungarian pastry shop in Manhattan, owner Philip Binioris told ABC News he was trying his best not to hand over the egg costs to consumers, but it’s unclear whether he could also absorb the increasingly banned costs.

“That’s frustrating. We don’t want to raise prices. I think we have fair prices and we like being able to stabilize them,” he said. “We’re just waiting to see how bad this can get before deciding on how to change the price. That’s tough.”

Consumers, small businesses and their customers continue to fire more for eggs amid the avian flu outbreak, while the nation’s largest producers and distributors of eggs report the rise in profits.

Cal-Maine Foods more than tripled in gross profits at the dawn of the 2023 avian flu outbreak, according to SEC filings. And according to their latest submissions, their total profits rose 342% to the second quarter of 2025 and the previous fiscal year.

Rispoli also told ABC News that grocery shoppers can see prices rise even if egg supply starts to recover, as grocery stores may try to recover lost revenue. She said it happened when egg prices skyrocketed at the start of the current avian flu outbreak.

“In the aftermath, the market was revising and coming down significantly, so retailers kept the prices on the shelves high to try to regain some of the previously confiscated margins,” she said.

Back at Ferrara in Little Italy, Repoa is searching everywhere and finding other ways to save money so that you don’t have to raise prices. He recently upgraded the building’s cooling system, improved the refrigerator, and saved money on electricity in the long term. He also takes lessons from his grandparents who went through Great Fear Presion and continued their business by baking smaller batches of goods to keep their products fresher and avoid waste.

“Eggs are being made to produce,” he said. “When we enter Easter, I’m going to bake last minute so that we don’t waste eggs.