“I’d like to report a crime,” said the man who called a Maryland sheriff’s office on April 16. There was a theft, he explained, involving a freight truck.
“So they stole the whole freight?” a dispatcher asked.
“Only took the cargo,” the man answered. It was valued, he said, at about $100,000.
The dispatcher asked what was stolen. The caller hesitated.
“They took … basically … they took a whole trailer full of eggs.”
The hens were unaware of the heist. They had done their part: the shuffling around, the squatting down, the gentle plop! to release one perfect orb, ready to be tucked into a carton and shipped to the grocery aisles and diner griddles and breakfast tables of America.
Before the product of their labor was an item on a police report, it was a shipment headed from Maryland to Florida: 280,000 brown eggs, sizes large and extra large.
By gobbling up its competitors,Cal-Maine built an egg empire without most egg eaters knowing the company’s name. But by the April afternoon when the 280,000 eggs left the farm, that was beginning to change.
A winter spike in bird flu was widely seen as the cause of empty shelves and eggs doubling or tripling in price.
Breakfast joints, from small-town cafes to mega-chain Waffle House, began charging extra for eggs.
Backyard chickens, a DIY solution to one shortage, led to another, of baby chicks.
In his first four months in office, President Donald Trump, who’d declared he’d “won on groceries,” said the word “eggs” in public at least 167 times.
With prices soaring, eggs of all brands were reported stolen from porches and farm stands. Two thieves were captured on camera sprinting through snow with more than 500 eggs from a Seattle cafe. A truck full of eggs was driven off an organic farm in Indiana. At one point, federal agents at the border were seizing eggs more often than fentanyl.
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