Ciara Meyer
Welcome back to the Bruno Brief. I’m Ciara Meyer, podcast host and section editor at The Herald. Recently, breakfast fanatics may have noticed a sign at Bagel Gourmet on College Hill announcing price hikes due to egg shortages, or they might have spotted a scarcity of egg cartons on the shelves at Trader Joe’s. On this week’s episode, we spoke with Lily Seltz about what she found when reporting on how the nationwide egg shortage has affected local businesses. Here’s Lily:
Lily Seltz
My name is Lily Seltz. I'm a staff writer now at The Herald, and I wrote an article about the very high price of eggs right now and how businesses around Providence are adapting to this, to the shortage.
Ciara Meyer
In the last few months, egg prices have skyrocketed, doubling and even quadrupling. The culprit?
Lily Seltz
It’s all about the bird flu. The bird flu has been around for a while, but the last few months have been particularly bad. At this point, more than 30 million birds have died as a result of the bird flu. When one is infected, then they have to cull the entire flock.
Ciara Meyer
As supply dwindles and prices rise, businesses are finding ways to compensate.
Lily Seltz
Bagel Gourmet has a new, like, 50-cent surcharge for any products with eggs in them. And then sometimes the prices are kind of just incorporated into the regular menu. Some places have, like, shifted what they're actually offering. That was the case with Sin Bakery. They’ve, like taken a couple they’ve taken brownies out of their display case because they’re really egg intensive...
Ciara Meyer
Last November, Thayer street welcomed Cracked, a restaurant exclusively serving egg sandwiches.
Lily Seltz
Pretty much immediately, egg prices, like, really started to skyrocket.
Ciara Meyer
But Cracked is among businesses that may have found a solution closer to home. Stamp Egg Farms in Johnston, Rhode Island, is, as of now, bird-flu-free. While their prices are still higher than usual, they offer a slightly cheaper alternative and a steadier supply.
Lily Seltz
They're actually doing better than you might expect, basically because they source all of their eggs from Stamp Egg Farms in Johnston, which is the flock that hasn't been affected by bird flu. Stamp Egg recently raised its, like, per-dozen price by $2, which is not insignificant, and Cracked did raise prices…
Basically the like going rate is, like, an extra 50 cents per egg.
Ciara Meyer
But with no end in sight for the bird flu epidemic, business owners are still struggling to see a clear, sustainable path forward.
Lily Seltz
I got a sense of real anxiety. The woman that I spoke to at Bagel Gourmet, she’s been there for a very long time, and she's seen the price of eggs go up and down over the years, and that’s pretty normal. There’s sort of seasonal fluctuations with availability and that kind of thing. But this is unlike anything she’s seen before.
Ciara Meyer
According to Lily, there are some signs of hope on the horizon.
Lily Seltz
Just like, in the last couple of weeks, prices have started to tick down a little bit, but they’re still really, really high.
At Sin, with the manager that I spoke to was just saying, you know, you never know what, what could happen, especially under she mentioned the, like, current presidential administration, that there’s, like, a real sense of general economic uncertainty. And I think the egg shortage is not helping that.
Ciara Meyer
The continuing egg shortage might even jeopardize upcoming holiday festivities.
Lily Seltz
Easter is obviously, you know, an egg-based holiday. It seems like there might be time for the market to recover, and like supply to recover. But if not, yeah, that could be a kind of secondary effect that it might be harder to find eggs for decorating and for hunts and that kind of thing.
Ciara Meyer
Thanks so much for joining us, Lily. Here’s a brief rundown of other important stories from last week.
On March 13, the University announced it would be implementing a temporary, staff-wide hiring freeze in response to uncertainty sparked by recent federal cuts to educational funding.
Just three days prior, Brown was among 60 universities that received a letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights warning of “enforcement actions” if they fail to “protect Jewish students on campus.”
And also on March 13, approximately 200 students gathered on the Main Green to protest the arrest and detainment of Columbia alum and activist Mahmoud Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at Columbia on Saturday.
Thanks again for tuning in to the Bruno Brief. This episode was produced, edited and scripted by Talia LeVine, Ciara Meyer and Anisha Kumar. If you like what you hear, subscribe to The Bruno Brief wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
Music:
Denzel Sprak: https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/304681
Frank and Poet: https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/304762
