Wholesale prices
How much do eggs cost wholesale?
Nobody can quote you a national wholesale egg price, including us — eggs are the most regionally fragmented item in this list and the price moves weekly. What you can do is convert your case price to a per-dozen number, compare it against a published market rather than against a guess, and know which four specs your rep can change without telling you.
What this page is and is not
We do not have wholesale quote data. Nobody publishes a national wholesale price for eggs that would mean anything on your invoice, and we are not going to invent one. The figure below is a retail-level US city average from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the same series behind our food cost index. Use it as a direction and a sanity check, never as a quote. The rest of this page is the part that is actually worth your time: how to read the quote you already have.
Where the tracked number sits
September 2026 · retail, US city average
$2.19
per dozen
- 3 months
- −2.7%
- 12 months
- −39.2%
Your delivered price will not be this number. It will be a different number, in a different pack, at a different point in the chain, in your region — and that is fine, because the useful question is not does my price match a national average. It is did my price move the way the market moved. A quote that rose in a quarter when the tracked series fell −2.7% is a conversation you can have with evidence in your hand.
For what the last twelve months did to specific dishes, the eggs price page runs the per-plate arithmetic off this same series.
The packs you are actually quoted on
A quote arrives as a case price. Nothing is comparable until it is converted — to another vendor, to last quarter, or to the series above. The right-hand column is that conversion done at the retail-level average, so it is a reference point with the arithmetic shown, not a price anyone should expect to pay.
| Pack | In tracked units | At the retail-level average |
|---|---|---|
Case — 15 dozen (180 eggs) The default foodservice pack. USDA's grade standard puts a dozen large at a minimum of 24 oz in shell, so a case runs about 22.5 lb gross — worth knowing when a delivery charge is by weight. | 15 × dozen | $32.84 |
Flat — 2.5 dozen (30 eggs) What a cash-and-carry sells. Convenient, and the most expensive way to buy eggs per dozen. | 2.5 × dozen | $5.47 |
Liquid whole egg — 30 lb pail Does not convert cleanly: you are buying egg without shell, so compare it on cost per finished portion, not per dozen. It removes cracking labour and has essentially no breakage loss. | — | not comparable |
What drives the spread
Four things separate any published average from the number on your invoice. Knowing which one a rep is moving is most of the skill.
Volume
The gap between a flat and a case is the largest single step on this page, and it is available to any kitchen using more than a few dozen a week. Beyond a case, the next step is a standing weekly order rather than a bigger drop — egg distributors price predictability, not tonnage.
Region
Eggs are heavy, fragile and cheap per pound, so freight from the laying region is a real share of the delivered price and a Northeast kitchen and a Midwest one are not in the same market. State law splits it further: California and Massachusetts both require cage-free production for eggs sold in-state, which makes those effectively separate markets with their own supply.
Grade & spec
Four levers, and a rep can pull any of them: grade (AA/A/B), size (medium through jumbo — priced by the dozen, sold by the count, so a size change is a silent price change), shell colour, and production claim (conventional, cage-free, free-range, organic, pasture-raised). Only the last one is usually written into the quote.
Vendor
A broadline distributor carries eggs as one line among ten thousand and prices them to the contract; a dedicated egg distributor prices them to the market and usually beats the broadline on this one item while being no use for anything else. Cash-and-carry is the backstop, not the plan.
The public benchmark
USDA Agricultural Marketing Service publishes shell egg market reports covering wholesale prices by region and size, on a schedule most of the trade reads. That is the number your distributor is pricing off — go and read the same one: ams.usda.gov/market-news.
We name these rather than restate them. A market level quoted from memory is a fabricated statistic, and the point of a public benchmark is that you can go and read today's.
What to ask for
- Grade A large, white, 15-dozen case, delivered — and the delivered price per case, not per dozen, because that is what will appear on the invoice.
- The price basis: fixed for the week, fixed for the month, or floating on a named published market plus a stated margin. A quote with no stated basis is a quote that can move without a conversation.
- Whether the case is loose-pack or in flats, if that matters to your line.
How to tell whether your quote is reasonable
- 1Divide by 15. A case price only becomes comparable to anything — another vendor, last month, the tracked series above — as a per-dozen number.
- 2Compare the direction, not the level. The series above is retail and national; your quote is wholesale and local, so it will sit somewhere else. What it is genuinely good for is the question has my quote moved the way the market moved, and if your price rose in a month the market fell, that is a conversation with evidence attached.
- 3Price the substitution before you take the increase. A brunch menu is the most egg-exposed section a restaurant runs — see what the current move does per plate on the eggs price page before deciding whether to reprice or to change the dish.
Red flags
- A market-based price that only ever ratchets up. If the contract floats, it floats both ways, and you should be able to point at the week it last came down.
- Size substitution. Medium delivered against a large order is a price rise disguised as a delivery, and a three-egg omelette recipe absorbs it invisibly.
- A cage-free or organic claim in the sales conversation that is absent from the invoice description.
Terms on this page
Price creep
Small, frequent supplier price increases that individually look ignorable and collectively remove several points of margin a year.
Edible portion vs. as-purchased
AP is what you paid the supplier; EP is what the usable part actually costs after loss.
Plate cost
The total ingredient cost of one served portion, garnish and sides included.
A good quote still gets worse without anyone deciding to.
The negotiation is the easy part. What costs money is the eleven months afterwards, when the case weight drifts, the lean point changes, the slice count moves and every recipe built on the old number keeps quietly reporting the old cost. Marji reads the invoice, recosts every dish the ingredient touches, and tells you which menu price stopped working.
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