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Eggheads is the go-to podcast for egg industry professionals who are interested in leadership and innovation in the egg world. Host Greg Schonefeld explores the evolving world of modern egg farming, from the latest in cage-free innovations and organic certifications to navigating the economics of large-scale production. Whether you're an egg producer, supplier, or involved in poultry genetics, this show provides the insights and expert discussions you need to thrive in the industry. Crack open the science, strategies, and stories behind the egg industry’s biggest challenges and opportunities.
Karyn Rispoli:
It is been nine weeks of unrelenting increases. Normally when the market's going higher, you get to a point where it's like, okay, maybe we can test the market here. There's not even been an opportunity to test any kind of stability because every day the numbers are just higher than the day before without question. And the numbers tell one story, but a lot of times there's more going on behind the scenes and it's really getting to that why.
Greg Schonefeld:
Hey there. Welcome back to Eggheads for our 20th episode. I'm your host Greg Schonefeld. Egg prices, if you've bought a carton in the last couple of years, you probably notice they're anything but predictable. One day they're affordable, the next they're skyrocketing. What's driving this volatility? And more importantly, what does it mean for those producing, selling and buying eggs at scale? To answer that, we need to look beyond just supply and demand. The egg market is shaped by a web of factors, from bird flu outbreaks wiping out millions of layers overnight to the ever-changing role of commodity pricing. And at the center of it all is the work of market reporters, people whose job it is to make sense of the chaos and provide industry benchmarks that affect contracts, negotiations, and ultimately the price you see at the grocery store.
Karyn Rispoli:
The key thing to understand is that we don't create prices, we gather, analyze, and publish the information that reflects actual market activity.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's Karyn Rispoli, Managing Editor of Eggs at Expana, formerly Urner Barry, one of the key organizations that reports on egg market trends. She's been tracking the industry's highs and lows for over six years, navigating the challenges of volatile pricing, record breaking demand, and the ongoing impacts of avian influenza. In this conversation, we'll break down how egg pricing really works, why it's so hard to predict, and where the industry might be headed next. Karyn, I'd love to start with just your background. I understand you were an English major and then got into this reporting area, specifically in energy, and then made a transition over to eggs. Can you talk about how that transition took place?
Karyn Rispoli:
Yeah, absolutely. So transitioning from energy to eggs was definitely a shift in terms of the industry and its different dynamics. But I would say that my approach to market reporting is really pretty consistent. Whether it's energy or eggs, the core of what I do is really about maintaining integrity, ensuring accuracy, and staying engaged with the market. One of the biggest things that I carried over from energy is the importance of building strong relationships and really listening to the people who drive the market. You can look at supply and demand data all day long, but if you're not actively talking to traders, producers, buyers, the people who are making decisions on the ground, you're really missing half the story. The curiosity and willingness to engage is something I've always prioritized no matter what market I'm covering. And the goal is always the same really, to provide market participants with the most reliable, well-rounded and insightful information that I can. That approach has served me well really across both industries and what I strive to do every day.
Greg Schonefeld:
When you're saying asking the questions and really talking to the people, is it understanding the why behind the numbers? Is that what you're saying?
Karyn Rispoli:
Precisely. Because the numbers tell one story, but a lot of times there's more going on behind the scenes and it's really getting to that why, understanding what's driving somebody to buy at this level or sell at that level. That's the piece that I think people who are just looking at numbers every day don't get that piece and so that's the insight that we're able to bring to the market.
Greg Schonefeld:
Egg prices don't just shift, they swing, sometimes by 30 cents in a day. Unlike oil, which reacts to global events, eggs are shaped by domestic supply and demand, and right now bird flu is wreaking havoc, wiping out millions of layers and fueling extreme volatility. That's where market reporters like Karyn come in. Every day, she works to cut through the noise, track real trades and make sense of the chaos. So what does that actually look like? Let's dive into a day in her life.
Karyn Rispoli:
It's always pretty busy, but lately I would say it's a little bit busier just because eggs are a part of the everyday news cycle. I almost feel like half my job is media relations and the other half is market reporting. But essentially when I come in each morning, it's just taking a look at the public trading board where I can see bids, offers, trades, looking at the previous day's trades, what may have transpired after we wrapped up for the day. And then immediately just start hammering the phones and emails too. I mean, people often ask, "How do you collect information?" The answer to that is in whatever way possible. I mean really I think the best way we can do it is through a multi-pronged approach so that we're getting information from multiple channels at once and have as much information at the ready when it comes time to make our assessment.
Obviously we're chit-chatting, "I'm hearing this, what are you hearing?" Just sharing information so that we're each carrying that into our conversations. So all morning we're all just bringing in as much information as we can and then we get together and make our assessment. We start going through the data points and figuring out, okay, where do we need to be today? And there's a lot of different points to look at, and we've got obviously different colors, different sizes, conventional, cage free. Some days are a little bit more challenging than others. I always say we try to be reliable, accurate, and timely.
The timely part of it lately is a little bit more challenging just because there's so much data to look at. But that pretty much wraps us up through midday, getting that market out, and then it shifts to getting the comments written. So now we know, okay, here's what prices did, but now comes the part where we have to explain the why. For me, as you mentioned earlier, I have a background in English, so that's really how I ultimately got into this field. I know how to write, I know how to communicate. So for me, that's always the fun part is now trying to take something that's complex and put it into terms that most people can easily understand.
Greg Schonefeld:
A couple follow-ups there. So you said hammering the phone, sending out texts. Who is that going to? Is that producers? Who are you talking to in that?
Karyn Rispoli:
Pretty much, yeah. I wouldn't say, I'm not necessarily texting retailers, but we do speak with them. We speak to mostly producers, traders, distributors, people that are more involved in the spot market, so stakeholders in the spot market are primarily who we want to talk to on a daily basis. And then we do speak to buyers as well because their perspective is important. A little less often, just because again, what we're looking to capture and what influences our daily assessments is the transactional values that are taking place in the spot market. But we do try to talk to stakeholders along the entire value chain.
Greg Schonefeld:
But ultimately it's people who are actually seeing these deals take place or they're part of the deals?
Karyn Rispoli:
Absolutely. So we're talking to the people who are buying, selling, or matching up the buyers and sellers.
Greg Schonefeld:
Then what are people doing with this information? Using it for decision-making or?
Karyn Rispoli:
Yes. Yeah, exactly. So essentially what we do is create a fair market value for well really many different commodities. And that becomes the negotiating point for buyers and sellers and they can choose to use that in whatever fashion they see fit. We will pay you Expana, Midwest Large, less X amount of cents for the next quarter or the next year or whatever that is. Or they oftentimes will price it off of the previous Thursday's market or they'll do it on a rolling average.
That's not to say that all eggs are traded off of these prices. There are certainly plenty of producers and buyers that will use formula pricing. But I would say in a lot of instances it's a blend. So some people, just for hedging purposes, they'll have a certain amount of their business that is contracted on a formula like grain-based, so it's tied to the cost of grains and feed. And then there's a certain percentage that is tied to cost plus. So basically whatever it costs for the producer to make that plus a slight margin. And then there's a percentage that's market-based and so it's following along with whatever the wholesale market is doing.
Greg Schonefeld:
But it gets even more complex, contracts, formulas, and shifting benchmarks. Pricing isn't as simple as supply and demand.
Karyn Rispoli:
There's levers that sometimes they'll put in there where it's okay, you can have X amount of product at a cost plus or at grain-based, but any volumes additional to that will have to be at a market-based price. Obviously to help protect the producers because especially in a market like this where we're up to now close to $8, well, gosh, in the South Central already over $8 per dozen. If you're a producer and you're locked into a lot of contracts that grain-based or cost plus, there's obviously a very large gap there between those two figures.
Greg Schonefeld:
I guess that really shows to me why people care quite a bit what you're reporting. There's two sides to this because you're discovering what's happening out there, but then what gets published also may be tied to other deals that have already been made, if I understand that correctly.
Karyn Rispoli:
So the contracted prices are tied to the market, so that's separate from the spot market that we're assessing. I don't know if these percentages are accurate, but I think this is true of most commodities that about 10% of what trades essentially sets the price for the other 90%. About 10% of what producers have is handled in the spot market. And then that is what creates spot market pricing and then that spot market pricing influences that other 90%. So it's not necessarily circular in the sense that what's already contracted is influencing what we're quoting.
Greg Schonefeld:
Okay, so just to break this down. Only about 10% of the eggs are sold in the open market each day, but that small percentage sets the price for the other 90%. Contracts, formulas, and benchmarks all rely on those spot prices, which means what gets reported today can ripple through the industry for months. That's why accuracy matters and why Karyn's job isn't just about numbers, but about making sense of the bigger picture. Let's back up for a second because I don't want to gloss over some of the history here. How did Expana become the industry benchmark for eggs? Well, it all started over 150 years ago with a printer in New York City who had a simple but game-changing idea, standardizing market prices. What began as a small publication eventually grew into one of the most trusted names in commodity reporting.
Karyn Rispoli:
Urner Barry has been around for ages, 168 years in fact, which is pretty wild when you think about it. So it started all the way back in the mid 1800s, a gentleman named Benjamin Urner was a printer in New York City, I think down on Canal Street, and he was regularly printing price circulars for merchants that were buying and selling different goods coming into the city. And he noticed that there was a little bit of an issue. A lot of these circulars had conflicting prices, which made it obviously tougher for shippers to figure out what anything was actually worth. So he had this simple but game-changing idea, which was what if there was one reliable objective market report that everyone could trust? And with that, he launched what was known as the Producer's Price Current, it later became the Urner Barry Price Current and now is known as the US Egg Market Update.
But that's really the origins of it. I mean, it started all the way back then when literally they were trading eggs in barrels of oats. There were no cartons or anything else. So it's a very storied history. And the company stayed privately owned all the way up until more than a decade ago. Now the ownership group sold to private equity. So we had been previously owned by a group called AgriBriefing and then about two years ago they sold again. We merged with Mintec as well as some other brands. And so all of those brands came together and are now known collectively as Expana. So we went from being privately owned and just isolated pretty much in New York, New Jersey area, to now having roughly 300 employees all around the globe.
Greg Schonefeld:
Unlike the stock market, egg pricing isn't tracked in real time, it's gathered through calls, texts, and industry relationships. Some are eager to share, others stay quiet, but the trust in Expana's assessment keeps the data flowing. Still, not everyone picks up the phone.
Karyn Rispoli:
We are fortunate in the sense that eggs are benchmarked by the industry, which means that stakeholders have a vested interest in making sure that we have all the information we possibly can to make that assessment as accurate as possible. So different markets, it's different agencies. I think for beef, it's the USDA, so they hold the benchmark. So that makes it perhaps a little bit more challenging for the beef reporters at Expana because they're just providing guidance, nobody has necessarily a vested interest, they don't have business riding on that daily quote. The challenge for them is they have to make sure that they're always bringing fresh perspective. Not that we don't do this, but you have to make somebody really want to pick up that phone. And I had a little bit of that challenge with the oil industry because while we were benchmarked in certain markets, the market that I was assigned to was not benchmarked.
Really it comes down to, again, relationships. Making sure that people find value in your conversations, that they want to take your phone call, that you're going to have some new piece of information or some insight. And just always digging around and try and find something that brings value to that conversation, which ultimately makes your job that much easier and more successful. So again, with eggs, there's not as much of a challenge. Now, don't get me wrong, there are certainly participants within the market who simply don't want to talk to us for whatever reason. We've tried for decades and some people just don't want to participate, and that's okay. We still try every now and again, we'll throw that out there and see if we can get them on board. But generally speaking, people want to take our calls because well, one, they know we're talking to a lot of other people and while we always maintain confidentiality, we have a lot of insight. And because, again, there's real money riding on those assessments and they want to make sure that their voices are being heard.
Greg Schonefeld:
Now, to be honest, I got a little lost when we were talking about benchmarks. So to break it down, what Karyn is saying is that in the beef industry, the USDA is the benchmark. While Expana offers services in beef, people look to the USDA for market pricing. But in eggs, Expana's assessments are the benchmark, that gives producers and buyers in the egg market incentive to provide accurate information to Expana. But with real money on the line, some may try to sway the market. Karyn's team filters out bias to make sure the data reflects reality.
Karyn Rispoli:
It does get complex at times because this market is really unique in that eggs trade in all different ways. So you can have eggs that are already in a carton, labeled, ready to go off to the store, done. Then you have eggs that are pretty much fresh out of the chicken. And then you have eggs that are loose in cases, there are plant grade eggs, there are top grade eggs. And so we use what's called trade relationships to basically equivalize all of these various egg types to be able to put them into one quote because at the end of the day, we're quoting eggs and they trade in all these different ways. So there are times where you can have one type of egg pack that's trading at a much higher level than another or vice versa.
So that gets very challenging and that's one of the things that I would say certainly prevents this market probably more than any others. Not that I think any other market really has a potential for this, but it would be really hard to automate it because it takes a lot of, again, analyzing and talking to people within the industry and understanding what's going on, why these eggs are being discounted, why these are at a premium. But you get in those times what's called, like we referred to as a two tier market, where they're moving in different directions and you have to make all of it fit in one quotation. So it can be a little bit challenging.
Greg Schonefeld:
You said the story that goes with the numbers matters. Does the story capture that kind of thing?
Karyn Rispoli:
Yes, that's exactly right. And that's why I think the commentary that goes along with the numbers is so important because that gives us that forum to be able to explain. Because a lot of times people, they'll see, well, heck, I was buying eggs for a lot less and yet the quote went up today. So seeing those comments should put it in perspective and explain why things are behaving in the way they are.
Greg Schonefeld:
Egg prices don't just fluctuate, they have real consequences. When numbers move, people take notice, and not everyone is happy with how those shifts are reported. That tension isn't new. Market assessments have sparked debates for years. But how much of that frustration comes from misunderstanding the role of price reporting? I understand there's some misperceptions, maybe sometimes there's some people that get upset with what you publish, but maybe they're not exactly understanding the role you're serving.
Karyn Rispoli:
Yes, absolutely. No, that comes up quite often. I know there have been a few dust offs over the years between my predecessors and other people within the industry.
Greg Schonefeld:
Well, I guess what comes to my mind is Jack once said, "Oh, I had some knockdown drag outs with Urner Barry over the pricing." And that's why it can matter to people.
Karyn Rispoli:
And heck, I've had a couple myself. I mean, none that have gotten too out of hand. But yeah, this is real money and people have strong opinions about it. But I think that one of the issues that comes up quite often is that people generally misunderstand what it is that we do and I get why they might feel that way. When a single entity is publishing widely referenced price assessments, it can look a lot like we're setting the market. But in reality, our job is to report on where the market already is, not dictate where it should go. The key thing to understand is that we don't create prices, we gather, analyze, and publish the information that reflects actual market activity. We're constantly talking to, again, buyers and sellers, reviewing all of that transactional data and then ensuring that what we report is an accurate representation of the broader market.
Prices are determined by the industry itself, not by us. And I think a big part of that misconception stems from the fact that, again, our prices are so widely used in contracts and negotiations, when our assessments move, it has real financial implications. But again, that movement is really a reflection of what's already happened and not a decision that we're making in a vacuum. I think, again, this isn't unique to eggs, but to commodities in general, but markets function best when they have access to independent, unbiased information, and that's really what we're here to provide. I always say, "I have no dog in the fight." Whether prices are rising, falling or holding steady, our job remains the same, which is to report what's happening as fairly and accurately as possible.
Greg Schonefeld:
So now you're six years in this role and you've seen some things in those six years. I understand you came in right after the first AI spell. Can you walk through, I guess, what those six years have looked like?
Karyn Rispoli:
Yeah, it's been quite a ride. So I started in 2019, and at that point, the industry was just recuperating from the previous bout of bird flu, which occurred in 2015, '16. And a lot of times what happens after something like that is because the market gets so high, producers have extra cash, and so it leads to a period of building. It's like they've got all this cash on hand that they haven't had in a while, let's build new farms, let's build new barns, let's increase our cold storage.
And with that, production levels just got wildly higher than they had ever been before. If I'm not mistaken, my first month was the highest production number that we've ever seen in history of the US. I want to say it was 344 million in April of 2019. It was just severely out of whack in terms of how much production there was and how much demand. And so that first year for me was really trying to establish these relationships with producers who were pretty miserable from day to day because eggs were trading at 60 cents a dozen or something like that. I mean, it was to the point where at the retail level, you could sometimes buy three dozen eggs for $1. Which in today's day and age is hard to even fathom.
So it went from that in 2019, and then of course right into COVID era, which then brought obviously a whole new set of challenges. And then in 2022, so two years later, bird flu started. There's just been this constant evolution of what you'd like to think are black swan events, but I don't know, maybe they're just going to keep on happening because it just seems to be one after another after another. So it's been an interesting and volatile six years. But I will say that it keeps me on my toes and it keeps me interested and there's never any shortage of things to talk about and look at and evaluate. So that part of it is good from a market reporting perspective, but from the human side, I feel bad for the people involved sometimes because it's a lot to deal with.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Would you still call this unprecedented times now compared to what you've seen?
Karyn Rispoli:
Yeah, I would. As a matter of fact, I would say it's unprecedented in a couple of ways. I mean, obviously the prices are unprecedented. We've never seen anything quite like this. So in December of 2022, Midwest Large, which is the quote that we reference most often just because most of the country's production is in the Midwest, in December of '22, it had gotten to a record high of $5.46. And now we're very quickly approaching $8 per dozen. So we have well blown past the previous all time high, which at the time I think everybody figured, well, that's in the books. We're never getting back there again. But yeah, normally when the market's going higher, you get to a point where it's like, okay, maybe we can test the market here. There's not even been an opportunity to test any kind of stability because every day the numbers are just higher than the day before without question.
And again, that has to all do with bird flu, which there too, also unprecedented. We've seen bird flu for decades, but this strain over the last three years is different than any of the other ones before. It used to be where flu typically would start in the spring with migration. So all the wild birds would get moving, they would bring their disease along for the ride, and then next thing you know, layer farms are getting the virus, depopulate. By summer, things heat up, the virus can't generally withstand the heat, it would die off, and that would be the end of it. Well, this one is seemingly interminable. It has lived through every kind of weather event imaginable. They have found it in all corners of the planet. I mean Antarctica, how does it live in Antarctica? But it just never dies down. Not entirely, it does quiet down at times.
There have been stretches of 10, 11 months where there's been no new outbreaks, but the period that we're in right now is the worst of it. So it started up again in mid-October and between mid-October and now we've lost well over 40 million egg laying hens in less than four months. Now, to put it in perspective, in 2022 when the bird flu started to spread here again in the US, we lost about that much in the entire year. So it seems to be extremely virulent right now. It is unrelenting. A couple months ago, it wiped out nearly all of California's production. Right now it's wreaking havoc on Ohio and it sounds like Pennsylvania is starting to heat up as well. It just seems that once it gets into a certain pocket, it just infiltrates the whole area and doesn't stop until it's done.
So there's a lot of challenges that go along with that because every time a new outbreak occurs in an area, it creates a new control zone, which means there's a lock on that area in terms of being able to repopulate. It's going to take really a sustained period without any new outbreaks in order to start moving the needle in the right direction again. Which based on what we're seeing right now is hard to imagine when that happens because we can't make it a week without millions of birds falling to the flu.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah, it's been absolutely devastating across the board, of course, the farmers and everyone directly involved in handling the birds and employees, and I'm sure a ton of people living on edge with this.
Karyn Rispoli:
Yes.
Greg Schonefeld:
I guess, what does this do to the future of eggs? How does this all play out long term?
Karyn Rispoli:
I've definitely had a lot of people talking about reformulation in the last few weeks. My heart goes out to the people in the industry, not just producers, but even buyers. How do you plan around something like this? You're a buyer and you're trying to lock in for the next year and all of a sudden dried whole egg prices are careening toward $20 per pound. I mean, that's not sustainable. It's a very difficult position for them to be in. So I don't envy that position at all. But to that point, absolutely, there are companies that already are looking at, okay, how do we just get eggs out of our recipes? There are certain recipes that you can't, obviously you can't have angel food cake without egg whites. That's just not going to work.
Greg Schonefeld:
That'd be a sin. Yeah.
Karyn Rispoli:
Yeah. So some things you can't work the eggs out of, but where people can work them out, if not entirely, at least partially to limit the exposure, there's definitely some of that going on. And in terms of the future of the egg market and what happens from here, again, I mean, it's hard to say, but really it's going to take a sustained period without any new outbreaks to even get sort of a handle on, okay, where are we now and how do we get back to where we were before? One, because again, of the control zones. But another worrisome thing is that there have been recent farms that repopulated after having suffered an outbreak, three different farms within the last month or so, within weeks of repopulating tested positive again.
So that just raises a lot more, I think, concerns within the industry and fears about what is going on. Is it living in some crevices or corners of the barn? I mean, because they do very, very thorough decontamination, but I mean they're farms, you're going to have rodents and things like that. Could it be that there are small farm rodents that are still carrying it around that's just going to make it almost impossible to really fully eradicate? And then repopulating, of course, requires baby chicks. And that's something that's a different challenge because you're dealing with live production. So breeders can't obviously predict how many birds they're going to need based on the level of outbreaks that are out there. So I've had producers tell me that the wait time right now for baby chicks, if you were to place an order today, it could be a year, a year and a half before you're seeing those chicks.
So there could be some delays in getting repopulated just in gaining access to those birds. So I think we're in for a lengthy process of getting back to some measure of production that somewhat lines up with our needs as a country. The prevailing thought is that you need about one bird per person. So in the beginning of January, the USDA had put the bird count at 304 million. Which by the way is already 20 million less than the five-year average for that time, so it's already low. Then we've lost 20 plus million more birds since then. So there's always birds coming in, so it's impossible to know what's coming in to potentially offset some of that loss. But generally you're figuring probably that our current layer count is somewhere around maybe 280 million, which is one of the lowest levels it's been in the last decade. And meanwhile, we have more people in this country than ever.
I had looked recently, I want to say the last US census showed 340 million. So there is just an enormous gap between what we need in terms of production to satisfy needs. And by the way, that's 340 accounted for. We don't know how many people are here in the country that are undocumented, which tends to create greater demand as well. And now that doesn't mean of course that you need to have one per person at every month throughout the year. There are cyclical and seasonal trends. So ideally you want to be at peak production going into peak demand periods. You don't necessarily need that level of production in July when everybody's eating cold cereal and running around and not making hot breakfast. But you certainly want to have close to that at Thanksgiving and Christmas time.
Greg Schonefeld:
Do you think the market would like to be at that 340 million number, but it's like we're losing birds faster than we can add them on?
Karyn Rispoli:
Yeah, exactly. It's explosive right now. It's just explosive. I mean, in the month of January alone, we lost over 20 million birds. We've never seen anything quite like that. And it's showing no signs of slowing. Every day that I come in, I feel like I'm getting new reports. It's just ongoing. And yeah, it's two steps forward and maybe four steps back. So they're just not making any kind of headway. The other piece to this is that supply is one side, but then of course demand is the other, and there's not really a whole lot of relief coming on that side either. Everybody pays attention to the price of eggs. So for that reason, retailers tend to use eggs as a loss leader because people know what eggs cost, and when they see cheap eggs, that's where they go.
So a lot of the large national chains have been using eggs as a loss leader. So here we are again at almost $8 a dozen and you can still find eggs below $5 a dozen in a lot of retail stores. Now, again, a few years ago, they were three dozen for $1, people would've fainted if they saw $5 a dozen. But it's all perspective. So here we are in 2025, people have been grappling with grocery inflation for years. They're just used to higher prices. I mean, what is it? It's like I paid $7 for a box of cheese, it's not long ago. I don't think people are as put off by higher prices as they used to be. $5 a dozen, even if it's not ideal, it's not stopping consumers. So the demand component has really stayed strong. I had people last month telling me that their orders in January were even stronger than they had seen through Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is just incredible. It's really a combination of the two things. It's not just that we've lost supply, it's also that demand has stayed really strong at the same time.
Greg Schonefeld:
In other words, with the high prices, you would think demand would go down, but that's really not happening for some of the factors you named there?
Karyn Rispoli:
Exactly. I'm sure you've heard it, there's a saying within commodities, "High prices cure high prices, low prices cure low prices." But that only works if consumers are seeing those prices and when they're shielded from all or at least a good part of those increased costs, then it doesn't do anything to stem the demand. And so there's essentially a fundamental break in one of, if not the strongest economic principles. It's fueling stronger demand than what the industry can handle right now.
Greg Schonefeld:
I'm amazed by all the factors to consider and you've done a great job putting those all together in a way that's understandable. I appreciate that.
Karyn Rispoli:
Yeah.
Greg Schonefeld:
Thank you.
Karyn Rispoli:
Thanks. I appreciate it.
Greg Schonefeld:
The egg industry is anything but predictable, and as we've seen the forces driving prices go far beyond simple supply and demand. From avian influenza and production swings to shifting market dynamics, the industry is constantly adapting and with that comes uncertainty, volatility, and plenty of strong opinions. But as the saying goes, "Don't shoot the messenger." Karyn and her team aren't setting the prices, they're reporting on the reality of the market as it moves, using the process she shared with us today. The industry itself dictates these shifts, price reporters like Karyn are just there to make sense of the data, ensuring producers, buyers, and stakeholders have an accurate picture of what's really happening. A big thank you to Karyn Rispoli for breaking it all down with us today. If you found this conversation valuable, be sure to subscribe to Eggheads for more in-depth discussions on the forces shaping the industry. And as always, if you have thoughts or insights, we'd love to hear from you. Until next time, I'm Greg Schonefeld and thanks for listening to Eggheads. One more question for you, Karyn. How do you prefer your eggs?
Karyn Rispoli:
Oh, that's a good one. Gosh, there's probably not too many kinds of eggs I have met that I haven't liked. Except maybe a pickled egg, I don't know that I would eat a pickled egg. On a day-to-day basis, I eat scrambled eggs more out of convenience than anything. If I had to pick generally, I would probably lean more toward something richer like an Eggs Benedict, or over easy because yeah, there's something about that yolky goodness that just gets me
Greg Schonefeld:
Agree. Couldn't agree more.
Karyn Rispoli:
Yeah. Good answer.