Inside the great egg branding crisis

[ResidentialBusiness]

Matt Sia is a big fan of eggs. With his daughter, he’ll make slow scrambles bathed in pricey European butter. And as executive creative director at the design and branding firm Pearlfisher, he brought that same love to an egg carton he designed for the now retired brand Consider Pastures.

The regenerative farming producers created eggs with rich burnt sienna shells, and Sia designed a complementary blue package that celebrated their natural hue. To reach this reveal, the carton unfolded in a dramatic, multi-tiered story much like an Apple product, with messages like “care” and “cultivate” highlighted in gold foil. These premium eggs sold for $5. But today, as another New Yorker elbowing for eggs, that feels like a completely different era to Sia.

“Now everything has gotten thrown out the window. You stand at the shelf and and everything is $10 to $12. And I’m trying to figure out what the differences are. Being in this business, I am thinking, ‘I appreciate what you’re doing, but I’m not spending that much on these eggs,‘” he says. “This is coming from someone who cares a lot about brand. And I’m like, ’fuck it.’ I want to get free range if I can find them, but I look at the price tag attached and say there’s no way I can spend that much. This pack won’t last.”

Sia is all of us in the age of egg scarcity. He cares about the eggs his family is eating. But he cannot functionally care when those eggs get too expensive. The pantry staple, consumed by 90% of American households, currently costs 40% more than it did at the start of 2025. And it’s pushing the very idea of brand and consumer values to a breaking point.

Egg shortages are revealing a simple truth: People never had much brand loyalty to eggs, and as prices are spiking, whatever values previously drove your egg purchasing decisions are likely to be challenged by your wallet.

Consider Pastures

The death of the premium egg brand

Consumers traditionally choose an egg by type—conventional or speciality. Conventional buyers assume all eggs are the same, so whatever is cheap works. Specialty buyers might be coaxed toward animal welfare labels like “cage free” or “pasture raised,” or boosted nutritional attributes like omega 3s from hens fed fortified diets.

“There’s a guilt. Everyone looks for different principles, different claims and qualities, and sometimes that comes down to, ‘can I afford to buy this?’ Everyone has a different degree of choice when it comes to that sort of thing,” says Sia. “The reason it feels eggs are blurred together today is that the delta between your price and principles becomes so large . . . everyone here in NY is just trying to find the cheapest eggs.”

Most eggs look more or less the same, and so packaging is the vehicle for signaling a more or less premium egg brand. Ironically, the finest boutique eggs—those sold direct from small farmers—are distributed in forgettable, paper pulp cartons, often direct from the farm to the consumer. The store shelf tells a different story. Here you have a mix of cheap protective packaging—paper, styrofoam, and plastic—sold by a slew of brands that almost no consumer registers, according to data from Nielson and The American Egg Board.

Instead of brand loyalty, these shoppers hunt and peck for the best ratio of price and their desired attributes like “free range.” In many cases, styrofoam signals “conventional,” so consumers are drawn right to those packs. But while the package may attract a purchase, ultimately, consumers do expect to take a peek inside to double check the merchandise. As Sia points out, eggs might be the only item at the grocery store that people regularly open to inspect to ensure they aren’t broken. (Nobody opens a pack of Tide Pods to check if they’re leaking.)

As for the fate of the premium egg, for now, such an idea seems to ignore that, in an age of scarcity, all eggs have become something of a premium. People never cared that much about the brand of egg they purchased, and they are almost assuredly less concerned now.

Organic Egg Scorecard

The shifting identity of the egg as a brand

Eggs are sold by brands, but in reality, they are a much greater brand unto themselves—one that signals a cheaper, more convenient, more ethical protein than meat. The American Egg Board is a nonprofit funded by farmers to protect and grow that brand, with the primary mission is to increase our demand for this staple.

When Edward Hoffman took over as VP of marketing and communications two years ago, he charted a major strategy forward. He identified new target markets, and launched the organization’s “biggest and boldest” program ever to re-excite the market about eggs, filled with delectable recipes and information on nutrition.

But into Q4 of last year, the industry’s four-year nervousness about bird flu spiked into a true crisis. “Me and my team started looking at sort of the landscape ahead, and said, ‘you know, we need to start slow-rolling some of our programming, because we do not want to come across as tone deaf to consumers,’” Hoffman recounts.

What followed was not just a cessation of The American Egg Board’s plan, but a complete shift in strategy as it eyes the big egg holiday, Easter, on the horizon. Instead of positioning eggs as delectable and healthy, they are now positioning eggs as safe and frugal-friendly. The company is even amidst a new website redesign highlighting this new approach—aimed at both consumers and retailers that distribute eggs.

On the safety end, they’re tamping down concerns that you can get bird flu from eggs (when cooked, they are considered safe). And on the frugal end, they’re pushing an approach to eggs that helps “maximize the carton.” “We don’t want consumers wasting a single egg during this time,” says Hoffman. 

The board’s new guidance comes in the form of meal planning tips, recipes, and teaching consumers things like, yes, you can freeze eggs to preserve them longer.

“One example: If you really want scrambled eggs, maybe add in some other product with a cottage cheese or something, to sort of extend that carton,” says Hoffman. “And I’m perfectly comfortable [saying that]. I want to meet our consumers where they’re at because you know what, that’s what they need right now. That they are taken care of and they know that eggs have their back even when the industry is constrained.”

Just Egg

A moment for egg alternatives

But while consumers may be settling for the types of eggs they wouldn’t have bought a year ago, many believe supply chains may continue to be challenged through 2026 given the logistics of egg production. Sometimes the store shelves are just empty. What then?

For Josh Terick, the CEO of Eat Just (which makes the mung bean-derived egg substitute, Just Egg), this is the opportunity of a lifetime.

“Chicken eggs feel particularly uncool and not reliable right now. And it’s not even close: much more so than the launch, this is far and away the most important moment in the last 12 years since I cofounded the company,” says Terick. “It’s not big, but it’s just a little window open . . . where often around the country right now, we’re the only egg on the shelf . . . where people are thinking, is there actually another egg other than the chicken egg?”

The moment is a payoff for one of Terick’s key strategies, who has long insisted Just Egg be offered beside chicken eggs. Just Egg pops off the shelf in its yolky yellow milk carton packaging, with a modernist sans serif font meant to appeal to design-appreciative urbanites and affluent suburbs (which Eat Just considers its base)

For a company that’s “not suffering” but still only doing “tens of millions” in sales, Terick recognizes the potential inflection point that may not come again. Sales are up 70% YOY, and they’re seeing a 5x increase to growth on one of their core products at a top retailer. To feed new demand, Terick has completely rebuilt his schedule since egg shortages hit, responding to retailers, restaurants, and other entities inquiring about Just Egg at all hours of the day. In the last week, he’s spoken to a top three convenience chain, a top ten restaurant chain, and the U.S. military about providing Just Egg. He then reads me an email from a North Carolina mega breakfast restaurant that asked about Just Egg concluding, “sounds weird, but we’ll try it.”

Balancing the tone of Just Egg is key in this moment, and the company will be adopting a new brand slogan soon that gently pokes at the instability of the egg market: “Yo, chicken eggs, we got it from here.” They’re providing samples to NPOs, offering discounts to solitary retailers that don’t sell Just Egg, and partnering with 50 bodegas across NYC to sell Just Egg sandwiches as part of a “bird flu bailout.” 

“Every day, I just keep thinking, what else? What else can we be doing that we’re not doing that ten years from now, I [see when I] look back on this,” says Terick, who admits their greatest appeal to most retailers is just that they’re dependable in a time of crisis. “If you call them up, they would say, ‘you know what you can do for us, deliver on time.’”

The other thing keeping Terick up at night is how the company is positioned in pricing. For years, Just Egg sold at a loss, keeping the price around $5/carton to have closer parity with regular eggs. More recently, finding himself sick of raising more money, Terick prioritized the health of his business, and now Just Egg sells at around $7 to $9 a pack, which offers Just Egg a double digit margin. But in two years, Terick believes they have a technological path to reduce the price of producing Just Egg to have parity with eggs—and he can’t help but wonder, is it worth waiting until then to lower prices, or would more be gained by doing so now?

“It’s like these two things are pulling in me: One is, yeah, let’s f’ing go! Of course, this is a moment!’” says Terrick. “And then the other side is, boy, I like not spending every day trying to raise money.” Just Egg will probably reach a compromise, offering discounts like “buy one get one free” through retailers, before dropping prices in the future.

In any case, Terrick and Sia are in full agreement about the future of eggs on whole. The very idea of the boutique egg seems in jeopardy in an age of scarcity. And the ultimate cost in an uncertain egg market isn’t just the price of protein, but our psychological comfort in an era when supply chains of all sorts of goods are unreliable. 

“What’s next after eggs, are there things we don’t consider? Grains? Bread? Milk,” muses Sia. “It can spiral. We have access to everything all the time . . . then you realize . . . [we don’t].”

View the full article