Ken Ruinard / staff file / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Anyone who purchases eggs on a regular basis has likely noticed the price has started to escalate in a big way as producers continue to grapple with avian flu. That trend is now hitting Waffle House customers in the wallet, as the chain has opted to introduce a surcharge to compensate for the spike.
The poultry industry has spent the past few years battling the most recent wave of avian flu (specifically the H5N1 strain of the virus), but efforts to contain the spread have left a lot to be desired as chicken flocks in the United States and beyond have become increasingly decimated.
The disease has spread to other species including cows and humans (at least 67 people have had a confirmed infection since the start of 2024, and a woman in Louisiana recently became the first fatality earlier this year), but chicken farms have been the epicenter of the outbreak that has led to close to 150 million of the birds being euthanized since it began in 2022.
That decline in the population has been firmly reflected in the price of eggs, which rose by 65% over the course of the previous year and continues to head in an upward direction.
That’s obviously less than ideal if you’re a business that relies on eggs—which is certainly the case with Waffle House, the beloved institution with more than 2,100 locations in the United States that serves up 272 million of them to hungry customers on an annual basis.
Waffle House has been doing what it can to stomach that rise in its operating cost without any drastic changes to the prices on its menu, but according to CNN, it’s reached a tipping point that’s resulted in the chain announcing it will be adding a temporary 50-cent surcharge to every single egg that’s ordered until the market recovers.
The severity of hurricanes has historically been reflected in the so-called “Waffle House Index” that tracks closures linked to the hardy institutions that do everything in their power to stay up and running during those storms, and the fact that the restaurants are resorting to this kind of measure would suggest the egg price crisis is very, very real.