The Inside Story of the Egg Heist

Egg prices have retreated in the last few months as highly pathogenic avian influenza has slowed its wrath on hens across the United States, and the Trump administration has prioritized additional egg imports. But stories of high-profile egg thefts will live on.

Theft 1: Luna Park Café, a 1950s themed restaurant in Seattle, Washington, with a menu that promotes its Egg Benedict platter’s “Two poached eggs & sliced ham on an English muffin covered in Hollandaise sauce. Served with home fries” was the victim of a theft that may seem relatively minor compared to much larger ones.

Café staff reported that thieves took 540 eggs and other breakfast items in February from the walk-in refrigerator in the middle of the night during a snowstorm and took off in a white van.

Theft 2: Pete & Gerry’s Organics reported that just a few days before the Seattle egg theft, 100,000 eggs disappeared off the back of a distribution trailer in Greencastle, Pennsylvania.

Police said the eggs were worth approximately $40,000.

Theft 3: No egg theft so far in 2025 could top what happened in April. Brown eggs, 280,000 of them, were supposed to be part of a shipment from Maryland to Florida. But in a scam worthy of a Netflix documentary, thieves took off with a truck carrying the eggs after the driver dropped it off to have it washed.

A ransom note followed. So did a major law enforcement investigation that eventually targeted someone that authorities believed was one of the key figures in the theft: a man who called himself “Bernard.” It turns out, authorities said, that there was a person named Bernard. But that Bernard was not involved in any way in the egg heist…someone pretending to be Bernard was. 

While the stolen eggs from the three incidents totaled more than 380,000, they represent a small fraction of American producers 110 billion annual total.

Top Egg Producing States

1.      Iowa

2.      Ohio

3.      Indiana

4.      Pennsylvania

5.      Texas

Source: 2024 USDA NASS

U.S. Table Egg Production

2024: 93.1 billion (-1% from 2023)

Laying Hen Average Production

301 eggs per year

U.S. Per Capita Egg Consumption

2003: 255 per year

2024: 273 per year

Per capita consumption by Americans of eggs has increased 15% over the past 20 years. A result of our protein-obsessed diet trends?

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza’s Spread to Dairy Cattle

The spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza to the dairy cattle industry caught some researchers by surprise. They were aware of how quickly it could move through flocks and saw the potential to kill at least 75% of poultry in a commercial flock.

And that spread can be amazingly fast: 24-48 hours after first detection, producers could see a high mortality level in their flock. It is a threat that poultry farmers have been trying to manage for a decade now.

RELATED: American Farmland Owner reported on these developments last summer as researchers worked on vaccines to limit the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza.

Scientific American talked to researchers about why they did not expect H5N1 to find its way to dairy cattle the way that it did.

RELATED: Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced this action to help rebuild American egg supplies with the hopes that distributors would lower prices.