WASHINGTON — Cal-Maine Foods Inc. CALM, the country’s largest egg producer, agreed this week to pay $3.3 million and donate 53 million eggs to food banks, settling federal and state allegations that it worked with two smaller rivals to rig the price benchmark that determines what American grocery stores, restaurants and consumers pay for eggs.
The Justice Department and attorneys general in 17 states accused Cal-Maine, Versova and Hickman’s Egg Ranch of coordinating the bids they submitted to Urner Barry, the trade publisher whose daily price quotations function as the industry’s reference point for nearly every dozen eggs sold in the country. Between June 2022 and March 2025, prosecutors allege, the three companies communicated behind the scenes about what numbers to submit, manufacturing the appearance of tighter supply and higher demand than actually existed.
“We are proud that these settlements will keep egg prices competitive and keep money in the hands of consumers across the country,” said Nicole Sarrine, deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Beyond the payment and the egg donations, the proposed settlement, which still requires court approval, bars the three companies from communicating with competitors about prices or bidding strategy and requires each to appoint an internal antitrust compliance officer.
The companies did not respond uniformly. Cal-Maine denied wrongdoing outright, calling the allegations “baseless” and pointing instead to bird flu outbreaks and pandemic-era disruption as the real drivers of price swings. Versova said it was “pleased” the investigation concluded without any finding or admission of wrongdoing, noting that most of its eggs are sold under grain-indexed contracts rather than the Urner Barry benchmark. Hickman’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The three-year window at the center of the case is not incidental. It runs directly through the worst egg-price spike in modern US history, when avian influenza tore through laying flocks and the average price of a dozen eggs hit $6.23 in March 2025. Farmers were culling entire flocks under federal biosecurity rules during that period, a genuine supply shock that gave any coordinated bidding scheme cover to hide in plain sight. Regulators are now alleging that while the public absorbed record grocery bills as a natural consequence of a disease outbreak, three of the industry’s biggest players were allegedly also thumbing the scale.
Eggs were far from the only grocery item driving household budgets higher over that stretch. Eastern Herald has reported on how US inflation climbed to a three-year high in May, with meat, poultry, fish and eggs among the grocery categories rising fastest even as the White House insisted relief was imminent. Whatever role tariffs and energy costs played in that broader squeeze, the egg settlement suggests at least one corner of the grocery aisle had a second, quieter contributor: an alleged private arrangement among the companies whose bids set the price everyone else paid.
The underlying vulnerability has not gone away. Bird flu returned to commercial poultry flocks in a dozen states in June, according to Agriculture Department detections spanning laying hens, broilers and turkeys across the Midwest and South, threatening to reverse the price declines that had finally brought a dozen eggs back down near $2.19 by May. Eastern Herald has reported separately on the underlying biology of that persistence, after researchers at the University of Pittsburgh identified why H5N1 spread undetected through more than a thousand US dairy operations, a finding that underscores how poorly understood this virus’s behavior in new hosts still is, four years into an outbreak that keeps resurfacing.
What the settlement does not resolve is the money already extracted from consumers during the 2022-to-2025 window, if the allegations are accurate. The $3.3 million payment and the egg donations are restitution in name only measured against a period when Americans paid billions of dollars more for a staple grocery item than they might have otherwise. Court approval is still pending, and neither the Justice Department nor the states have said whether individual executives could face separate liability. With bird flu already back in a dozen states and the same three companies still operating under the same benchmark system, the settlement’s compliance requirements will face their first real test the next time supply gets tight enough to tempt a repeat.
