WattAgNet: US egg industry faces hard choices amid cage-free rush

The US egg industry is rapidly increasing its cage-free egg capacity in preparation for massive cage-free purchase pledges, but retail consumers aren’t on the bandwagon yet.

While the U.S. egg industry surges toward what looks like a cage-free future, individual egg producers and the organization that represents more than 90 percent of them, the United Egg Producers (UEP), find themselves at a crossroads. Should the organization of the country’s largest egg farmers go all in for cage-free production, or push back against the trend and defend enriched cage housing as an alternative to cage free?

The UEP held a series of six regional meetings across the country in August and the staff of Egg Industry attended meetings held in Atlanta and Des Moines, Iowa, on August 15 and 23, respectively. At those meetings, several egg producers expressed frustration with the disconnect between the marketplace and the cage-free egg purchase pledges made by major retail, food-service and food processing purchasers.

Cage-free egg supply exceeds demand
Many of the cage-free egg purchase pledges have implementation dates around 2025, which was thought to be the minimum amount of time required for the industry to convert from more than 90 percent cage-housed hens to being predominantly cage free. Unfortunately, many of the retail store purchase pledges don’t contain intermediate benchmarks, and they have provisions for availability and affordability of eggs. Couple this with many consumers’ reluctance to pay the premium for cage-free eggs, and we have the current confusion in the marketplace where surplus cage-free eggs are being sold to breakers at substantial losses for egg producers.

Conversion to cage free presents a huge challenge for egg producers and ...