As Egg Prices Soar, Amazon and Top Investors Profit

As avian flu decimated poultry flocks, two major U.S. egg producers — Vital Farms and Cal-Maine — have seen their profits and stock values soar. Between February 2024 and February 2025, Vital Farms saw its share value spike by 157.4 percent, while Cal-Maine observed an 87.4 percent uptick. These climbing stocks coincided with sky-high egg prices, often attributed to the shrinking egg supply, leaving consumers pinched.

This financial strain faced by consumers stands in sharp contrast to the financial windfalls of major egg companies — and their investors — over the course of the avian flu outbreak in the U.S. beginning in early 2022, revealing the often inverse relationship between consumer and corporate financial pressures during economic crises. 

“When eggs are short, everybody wants in,” Russell Diez-Canseco, the CEO of the egg producer Vital Farms, said on a call with investors in 2023, following a quarter of record-breaking revenue, as average egg prices soared across the U.S. 

Vital Farms’ top institutional investors — BlackRock, Wellington Management Company, Vanguard Group, Amazon, and Pictet Asset Management, according to Nasdaq — have also benefited from the company’s soaring stocks over the course of avian flu. Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, may have also benefited from higher retail prices of eggs, as well as the record-level volume of sales reported last quarter. 

“[Amazon] is making money in both directions. They’re making money if Vital Farms is charging Whole Foods a higher wholesale price, and Vital Farms’ profit margins are improving, which they are, year-after-year,” Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward, an advocacy research group, tells Sentient. Amazon has around a four percent equity stake in Vital Farms, which currently sells at Whole Foods for around $11 for a carton of organic eggs.

Vital Farms attributes some of its major boom in profits to avian flu. “We grew 55 percent in the first quarter of 2023, due in part to the category disruptions from avian influenza,” Diez-Canseco said in another investor call. This momentum continued through 2024, as Vital Farms reported  a 28.5 percent increase in net revenue over the course of the year. And as the company experienced reported outbreaks of avian flu in 2022, 2023 and 2024, it continued to rake in soaring profits to the benefit of its investors. 

As profits soared, some investors bought more stock. For instance, in February of 2023, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, disclosed that it increased its ownership in Vital Farms to 8.3 percent of the company’s stock.

Top Companies Enjoy Rapid Growth Despite Avian Flu & Record Egg Prices

Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the U.S., has observed a similar trajectory of record profits and rapid growth even as avian flu wiped out entire flocks. The company reported two outbreaks on its farms during 2023 and 2024, yet this was not enough to make a serious dent in Cal-Maine’s egg supply: The company sold more eggs in both 2023 and 2024 than previous years, cementing its corner of the conventional egg market.

Meanwhile, during the first three months of 2025, the egg producer saw its net profits rise to $508 million, more than three times the level from a year before, and eight times more than at the start of the avian flu outbreak in 2022. As a recent report by Food & Water Watch observed, “The bird flu outbreak and Cal-Maine’s price increases likely helped push its stock value up, which more than doubled since the start of the outbreak.” The report also found that the company’s board chair’s stock value grew by over $9 million in three years.

Cal-Maine’s top institutional investors include BlackRock, Vanguard, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Renaissance Technologies and State Street Corp, according to Nasdaq — some of the largest asset managers in the world that appear to be benefiting from the high egg prices. Earlier this year, the four daughters of Cal Maine’s founder decided to cash in the high stock, converting $4.8 million shares of stock at $92.75 per share.

Corporate Accountability Remains Scarce

While the spike in egg prices is often blamed on supply and demand, the dramatic surge of profit has raised questions about whether Cal-Maine has raised prices beyond what is reasonable to compensate for a more constrained egg supply. This has prompted the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Cal-Maine for price gouging.

“The total number of hens and the total number of eggs produced fell maybe five percent over that first year [2022], but prices went…up about two and a half times,” says Amanda Starbuck, the research director of Food and Water Watch. “[This] suggests that a lot of it has to do with corporate consolidation more than actual shortages.” While there is not a 1:1 relationship between egg supply and prices, the shrinkage of the egg supply didn’t appear to justify such a sharp rise in prices, according to Starbuck.

Though Vital Farms and Cal-Maine are both large, publicly-traded companies, they have different business models and customer bases.

Vital Farms, which sells pasture-raised eggs, has always priced eggs at a higher cost than conventional eggs. During the early covid pandemic, the company prided itself on not raising its price of eggs. “Despite fluctuations in demand, the cost of our eggs —  nor other Vital Farms products — have not increased,” stated the company on its website in 2020.

But this shifted in 2022, when Diez-Canseco announced that the company would “reluctantly and in small amounts” raise prices. Just last week, the company announced again that it would raise wholesale egg prices by at least 10 percent in response to the Trump Administration’s tariffs. It remains to be seen whether Vital Farms’ retailers, like Whole Foods and Target, will respond to this hike by also raising retail prices even more.

Diez-Canseco did not respond to a request for comment, but he has previously attributed Vital Farms’ recent success to an increase in total eggs sold, not increases in the price of eggs — particularly as the price of commodity eggs has risen much more sharply than pasture-raised eggs over the course of the avian flu outbreak.

Cal-Maine also didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the company has previously “strongly” denied the allegations of price gouging.

The Bottom Line

Flush with profits, both Vital Farms and Cal-Maine have expanded their operations over the course of the avian flu outbreak, cornering an even larger share of the egg market. Vital Farms is expected to soon begin construction on a new egg packaging and washing facility in southern Indiana, enabling the company to add165 farmers to their supply chain. Meanwhile, Cal-Maine acquired the former egg production facilities of ISE America, Inc. in 2024, adding the capacity for 4.7 million laying hens. Last month, it acquired the popular breakfast foods brand Echo Lake Foods.

“That’s part of this broader trend toward just enormously large companies,” says Lisa Graves, a democracy researcher and the founder of True North Research, an investigative research watchdog group, who has observed similar consolidation across the agriculture industry and other sectors. And even as these companies see record profits, she notes that worker wages remain about the same.

Referring to the sky-high egg prices and profits, Graves observed that, “it seems like consumers are being gouged in order to enrich the shareholders in ways that are really affecting the daily lives and the budgets of families across the country.”