About
About The Scramble
The shell-egg market in one screen: the benchmark price, the regions, the cage-free premium, inventory, and bird flu, from the public record, with no advice attached.
What this is
The Scramble is a weekly brief plus a set of always-current data pages on the US shell-egg market: the USDA national large white benchmark price, regional wholesale prices, the cage-free premium, weekly shell egg inventory, and a tracker of bird flu in commercial layer flocks. It is built for the people who buy eggs for a living, bakery and foodservice procurement, distributors, independent grocers, and producers, who need the number without reading six separate USDA reports line by line.
Who writes it
The Scramble is published by Alex Willen. The data pages are generated from the public USDA and APHIS record on a fixed schedule; the weekly brief reads what moved and writes it up in plain English. Every hard number on every page traces back to the government report that published it.
Where the numbers come from
Prices and inventory come from the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service Egg Market News reports: the daily national 5-day weighted index, the weekly regional and single-market reports, the weekly shell egg inventory, and the weekly retail feature activity. The bird-flu tracker comes from USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service confirmed detections in commercial poultry. The prices are reported exactly as USDA publishes them, in cents per dozen, as ranges where USDA gives a range, never flattened to an invented single number. Nothing here is estimated or sourced from a private data vendor.
Where we sit
The institutional egg trade pays for a private price service. The Scramble is the free, public-data layer beneath that: it reports USDA's own published numbers, plainly, and reproduces no private index. It is to paid egg intelligence what a clean read of the public record is to a subscription terminal.
What we will and will not do
We report public USDA and APHIS data and attribute every hard number to it. We do not forecast prices, supply, or the next detection. We never tell a reader when to buy, contract, or hedge, in any phrasing. A price move is reported plainly, its direction and its size; whether that is welcome depends on which side of the invoice you are on. We are not trading, purchasing, contracting, legal or financial advice; decisions are yours to make with your own judgment and the primary data.
New here? Start with how to read this, or see the exact math behind every number on the methodology page.