A group of major egg producers accused of price fixing for nearly three years will pay $3.3 million as part of a proposed settlement of an antitrust lawsuit brought against them by the federal government and 17 states, according to court documents.
The companies also agreed to donate more than 53 million eggs to food banks and nonprofit groups in the plaintiff states under the terms of the settlement, which was announced this week and is subject to court approval.
The defendants named in the lawsuit, which did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, were Cal-Maine Foods Inc. of Ridgeland, Miss., Hickman’s Egg Ranch Inc. of Buckeye, Ariz., and Versova of Sioux Center, Iowa.
The proposed settlement in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa will require the companies to cooperate with federal monitoring and to adopt compliance programs to prevent them from manipulating prices, the Justice Department said.
The federal government began its investigation as the average wholesale price of a dozen eggs in the United States reached a record high of about $6.23 in March 2025, exacerbated by an avian flu outbreak and elevated fuel, feed and packaging costs.
“No product more quintessentially represents affordability than the price Americans pay for eggs,” Stanley E. Woodward Jr., the associate attorney general, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Investigators said the companies conspired from June 2022 to March 2025 to limit the production of eggs so they would not meet demand and then placed a high volume of bids with the Egg Clearinghouse Inc., a national egg exchange, to drive up prices.
State and federal prosecutors argued that the companies’ actions prompted the market research company Urner Barry to increase its daily price quotations for eggs, which often determine how much grocery stores and restaurants pay for eggs.
Executives from the egg suppliers discussed the scheme over emails and text messages, the lawsuit said.
“When powerful corporations collude behind the scenes to raise prices, working families suffer the costs,” Attorney General Letitia James of New York, one of the plaintiff states, said in a statement. “These egg producers manipulated the market to squeeze even more profit out of consumers and businesses.”
Ms. James said New York would receive about 4.9 million of the eggs that will be donated by the companies as part of the settlement.
In a statement on Tuesday, Versova said its family of companies had lost more than 25 million egg-laying hens since the current outbreak of avian flu began in 2022.
“This is not only devastating for our farms and our employees, but it also decimated the U.S. egg supply, disrupted the egg market and caused extreme volatility in egg prices,” the company said. “Egg farmers in the United States don’t set the wholesale price of eggs, which are a commodity product. At Versova, most of our eggs are sold on grain-based contracts, which means the price our customers pay fluctuates based on the costs of grain inputs for hen feed.”
Versova added that it was pleased the complaint had been resolved without any finding or admission of wrongdoing.
In a statement on Monday, Cal-Maine disputed the lawsuit’s accusations, which it said were baseless.
“The period reviewed by the D.O.J. was a particularly challenging time,” Sherman Miller, the president and chief executive, said in the statement. “Temporary supply shocks, including in connection with multiple outbreaks of avian influenza, the Covid-19 pandemic, weather and other market dynamics — compounded by high inflation at the time — caused egg prices to surge periodically over the past five years.”
A lawyer for Hickman’s Egg Ranch did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Urner Barry and the Egg Clearinghouse Inc., which were not named in the lawsuit, also did not immediately respond to inquiries on Thursday.
