Matt Levine writing in his Money Stuff column on 1 July 2026:
There’s an electronic egg exchange that sets the market price of eggs. It’s called Egg Clearinghouse Inc., or ECI; its website is eggs.org. It is not the main place to buy eggs. You buy eggs at the supermarket. Supermarkets and restaurants and bakeries and other big egg users also do not go to the Egg Clearinghouse to buy most of their eggs. They enter into supply arrangements with egg producers, who deliver them the eggs they need at the times and places they need them.
The Egg Clearinghouse is for extra eggs. Sometimes the egg producers have too many eggs: Their hens have laid more eggs than they have sold to their customers. Other times, the egg producers are “net short”: Their hens have laid fewer eggs than they have sold, and they need to buy more eggs to deliver to their customers. The Egg Clearinghouse is a place for the egg producers who are short eggs to buy eggs from the egg producers who have extra eggs.
So far, so normal.
The price of eggs on the Egg Clearinghouse is whatever price balances supply and demand on the exchange: If egg producers want eggs, they bid for them; if they have extra eggs, they offer them. There is some market-clearing price, and producers who need extra eggs pay that price.
Just like other commodity markets. Normal.
What about supermarkets and restaurants and other egg users? They pay the price they negotiate with producers. How is that price set? You could imagine a supply contract saying, like, “we will sell you 100 dozen eggs a week for the next year at $0.30 per dozen,” or whatever. But in fact egg prices are variable, and the supply arrangements are often based on benchmark market prices. There is a reporting agency, now called Expana but formerly called Urner Barry, that computes daily benchmark egg prices based on trades (and bids and offers) on the Egg Clearinghouse.
I guess that just makes thing simpler. You need a market price for eggs, hey look there’s a market over there where people are selling eggs, let’s just use their price.
It would be weird if egg producers didn’t manipulate the Urner Barry price.
Right…
They did. The US Department of Justice announced yesterday:
As the complaint alleges, Defendants conspired to inflate Urner Barry’s price quotations by agreeing to: (1) submit a large number of bids; (2) cause multiple Defendants to bid in order to signal to Urner Barry that a diverse set of market participants needed to buy eggs; (3) submit a large number of bids in the hours leading up to the publication of Urner Barry’s price quotations; (4) submit bids that were unlikely to lead to executed trades; and (5) execute trades at premium prices.
Also right. Or as Levine notes wryly:
Yep. That’s just what you’d do, if you were (1) faced with this market structure and (2) maybe a bit hazy on market manipulation and antitrust.
The settlement also sparks joy:
The companies agreed to settle the cases…. As part of the settlements, the companies have agreed not to coordinate with each other on egg bidding. Delightfully, they have also agreed hand over some eggs?
From a press release:
New York Attorney General Letitia James today secured more than 50 million eggs for consumers nationwide and $3.3 million from some of the nation’s largest egg producers for colluding behind the scenes to raise prices…. Of the 53 million eggs obtained through the settlement, approximately 4.9 million eggs will be delivered directly to food banks and community organizations serving New Yorkers.
And what will become of the remaining 48.1 million eggs?