I've been buying the same brand of organic eggs from my local Whole Foods for like two years, and the price just jumped from $6.99 to $9.49 a carton last month. Did something happen with the supply chain or are farms just charging more now? It's getting ridiculous.
That jump does hurt, but it's not just organic eggs - conventional ones have gotten pricier too. Bird flu has been decimating flocks for the past couple years, and it hit hard again recently. When supply tightens that much, prices spike across the board. Organic farms got squeezed especially bad because they can't just restock as quickly as conventional operations, and they already operate on tighter margins to begin with.
There's also feed costs and labor to factor in. Organic feed isn't cheap, and when grain prices go up (which they have), those costs get passed straight to you. Farms aren't just deciding to charge more out of nowhere - their actual expenses went up. Some of it's definitely companies taking a bigger cut while they can, sure, but a lot of that $2.50 jump is real cost pressure.
My advice: check if your store has a house brand organic option. Sometimes the markup on name brands is wild. Also worth comparing what other stores nearby are charging - I've seen the same carton vary by two bucks depending on where you go. If it stays this high through the rest of the year, it might be worth looking at conventional eggs for some uses, or just accepting that this is what organic costs now.
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