“Making It Work” is a series about small-business owners striving to endure hard times.
Bird flu outbreaks that wiped out about 15 percent of the nation’s egg-laying chickens and drove wholesale egg prices to a peak of more than $8.50 a dozen in February have vexed grocery shoppers and prompted big breakfast chains to add surcharges to diners’ checks. But for owners of small eateries, paying double or triple for an ingredient they crack by the hundreds each day could potentially put them out of business.
These business owners are getting creative: changing recipes; using liquid or powdered eggs, which haven’t gotten as expensive as quickly; and selling whatever items they can that don’t include eggs — things like falafel or packaged snacks or even fresh flowers.
Prices have come down in recent weeks but remain historically high, and worry about new outbreaks is keeping business owners on edge. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicted on Tuesday that egg prices would climb nearly 58 percent this year. Food trends like all-day breakfast menus and protein-heavy diets are keeping demand — and therefore prices — high, according to analysts at CoBank, a bank that lends to farmers.
Eggs are too perishable to be stockpiled and small businesses generally don’t have extra cash for refrigerator space to keep extra eggs even for brief periods, said Rob Handfield, a professor and the director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative at North Carolina State University.
“It’s not like you can stock up on a month’s worth of eggs,” he said. “You really rely on those weekly or daily deliveries of eggs if you’re a small business.”
Restaurant and bakery owners could charge more for their baked goods or breakfast sandwiches, but they fear that hiking prices will drive away customers.
“That’s the big challenge for a lot of owners right now,” said Holly Wade, executive director of the NFIB Research Center at the National Federation of Independent Business.
Here’s how the owners of four small businesses are trying to be creative in adapting to the jump in egg prices.
Square Diner, New York City
For most of the 24 years Ted Karounos and his wife, Ann, have owned the Square Diner in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York City, egg prices hovered between $30 and $35 for a case of 30 dozen eggs. During the pandemic, prices spiked as high as $100 a case.
Today, Mr. Karounos would be thrilled with that price. “This year’s been scary,” he said. “I’ve never seen $200 before.” Now, he is paying $239 per case — a nonnegotiable cost, considering that he serves about 360 eggs a day at the Square Diner, a classic restaurant with booths, a long row of counter stools and vintage signs adorning the walls.
Eggs are the star of the diner’s signature omelets and of the “lumberjack” breakfast platter that includes eggs and pancakes, which also incorporate eggs in the batter. In total, Mr. Karounos estimated that about 60 percent of his menu included eggs.
Mr. Karounos raised prices 7.5 percent last year to keep pace with inflation, he said, and is considering hiking them again. The margins on something as workaday as a two-egg breakfast have shrunk drastically, he said: “You’re talking about a dollar per plate of lost profit.”
“This is not an ingredient we can go without,” he added. “Right now we’re just absorbing the hit.”
Oh My Cupcakes!, Sioux Falls, S. D.
At least 90 percent of everything Melissa Johnson sells includes eggs. That’s not unexpected for a bakery, but Ms. Johnson, founder and chief executive of Oh My Cupcakes! in Sioux Falls, S.D., said the price of eggs led her to add other types of inventory.
“The more items we can come up with that don’t include eggs but still supplement our income, the better off we’ll be,” she said. She has added bags of snack mix and dry pancake batter mix to the shelves, along with gift items like candles and fresh flowers.
Ms. Johnson considered adding a surcharge to offset some of the increase in egg costs. But she worried that even an increase as low as 25 cents would dissuade customers, who are already spending less now than they did in previous years.
“We could easily price ourselves out of the market,” she said. “Cupcakes are not a necessity. We understand people are really needing to make some decisions with how they’re spending their hard-earned money.”
La Flor de Yucatán Bakery, Los Angeles
The sweet breads, cakes and desserts Mark Burgos sells at his family-owned bakery in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Central Los Angeles have two things in common: traditional Mexican flavors and lots of eggs.
“Very few things don’t have eggs in them,” he said, listing customer favorites like kings cake, a traditional holiday sweet bread; tres leches cake; and flan. His flan recipe alone, which makes two dozen portions, takes 260 eggs. “You don’t have a lot of wiggle room,” he said.
Mr. Burgos has started buying fewer eggs and hunting down liquid and powdered eggs so he can save whole eggs for recipes where he can’t make substitutions. “We’ve had to use everything we could get our hands on,” he said, adding that he found liquid eggs in January but had no such luck in February.
Mr. Burgos said he had had to raise prices by about 20 percent, but he said the increase — plus the economic impact of the recent wildfires in Los Angeles — had hurt business. “Since things are expensive, things slow down,” he said. “Everybody’s having a hard time.”
Side Piece Kitchen, Tacoma, Wash.
Eggs are ubiquitous on the menu at Side Piece Kitchen, a restaurant in Tacoma, Wash., that specializes in brunch: The sandwiches are laden with poached or fried eggs as well as egg-based sauces. Even the latkes — the restaurant’s version of breakfast potatoes — use eggs as a binding ingredient.
But the owner, Hailey Hernandez, who opened the restaurant with her mother and husband in 2022, says her newest menu items have fewer eggs — or none at all. Recently, the cost of eggs prompted her to halve the number of fried eggs in her signature maple-sausage-and-cheddar biscuit sandwich down to one, and to set a daily market price for eggs ordered on the side ($6.50 for two eggs in mid-March).
Side Piece’s weekly specials no longer feature eggs, Ms. Hernandez said. “We’re spending more time really transforming ingredients” to elevate cheap items like chickpeas into an appetizing dish, she said. “This week we made falafel from scratch.”
