Strategic investors rotate portions of their investments to where they think the trends will help their short-term or long-term returns. It’s not always just an effort to time the entire market, but it certainly involves rotating assets where the rewards are higher or where the risk is lower. This mindset can be applied to all walks of life — even what you buy to live on!
Oggonomics would like to encourage consumers to adopt a strategic mindset to their personal finances. In the case of 2025, let’s start with using a strategic approach to your groceries. Specifically, this means it’s time to stop buying eggs.
You do not have to eliminate eggs from your diet entirely to help out here. It’s just time to start limiting how many eggs you eat and how many dishes you eat that need eggs to make them. Otherwise, we are all going to feel like we choked the hen and broke the egg in our hand!
Inflation overall is one thing. Inflation is still in the news. But what should really matter is “Myflation” — what each person’s costs are for the goods and services they buy rather than worrying about the entire consumer basket of goods and services that make up inflation in the whole economy.
Oggonomics is signaling a strategic mindset to help beat the high cost of groceries. You won’t beat or defeat food inflation entirely, but you can kick the ridiculous part of grocery bills out of your life. In this case, cutting your egg consumption may help. And if everyone applies this strategic aspect of groceries within reason it may even drive down the prices of the most expensive aspects of a grocery bill.
For 2025, let’s all do our part here to be beat “myflation” by cutting egg consumption until the supply of eggs comes back in-line with demand.
Americans have a love affair with eggs. Whether it’s eating eggs at breakfast or using eggs for baking and frying, eggs are always in high demand.
The problem in 2025 is that the bird flu outbreak of 2024 has sent the ratio of chickens in America to people in America to much lower levels even without considering the extra few million people who have come into the country in the last few years.
And the food-out category has a major issue. Restaurants are even taking extreme measures by passing on an “egg premium per egg” on meals that use eggs — and some restauranteurs are even going to local stores rather than buying from distributors to save cash.
Using data from the St. Lous Fed (FRED) shows how the cost of Grade A large eggs has soared per dozen from $1.79 in Dec-2021 to a zenith of $4.82 in Jan-2023. Prices went back down to $2.04 per dozen in Aug-2023. Zoom forward to the end of 2024 and prices were back up to $4.14 per dozen.
The food companies which have direct egg exposure have been winning as well. Cal-Maine Foods, Inc. (NASDAQ: CALM) has seen its stock surge over the last year. It is up 96% over the last year and up 58% over the last six-month period. Vital Farms Inc. (NASDAQ: VITL) has been public for a shorter time and its results have been more volatile. That said, its gain of 7% in the last six-month period is dwarfed by a gain of 152% over the last year.
I just looked at my local HEB prices on a dozen A grade eggs, and here is what was shown live as of Feb. 6, 2025:
- Hill Country Fare Grade A Large White Eggs, 12 for $4.92
- H-E-B Grade A Cage Free Jumbo Brown Eggs, 12 for $6.01
- Farmhouse Grade A Cage Free Jumbo Brown Eggs, 12 for $6.32
Or you can really splurge with pasture-raised, cage-free and organics:
- Central Market Pasture-Raised Large Brown Eggs, 12 for $7.99
- Central Market Organic Pasture Raised No Soy Large Brown Eggs, 12 for $9.55
- Farmhouse Grade A Cage Free Large Brown Eggs, 12 for $9.13
If you want to help beat the high cost of eggs, take your own consumption down and drive down demand. It should help until chicken populations catch up. The BLS report for Dec-2024 showed egg prices as the single largest inflation item at 36.8% — and restaurants have only just begun implementing those per egg fees.
The category that includes eggs is the meat, poultry, fish and eggs category. It rose by 4.2% in 2024. While that is still far from cheap, there have to be some more affordable meat options for protein than eggs at this particular time. But hey, now you at least know how part of the cost of chicken wings that you used to eat at restaurants for 35-cents now cost 75-cents to $1.50 per wing.
