100,000 Eggs Are Stolen in Pennsylvania Amid Shortage

The Pennsylvania State Police said this week that they were investigating the theft on Saturday of 100,000 organic eggs worth more than $40,000 from a distribution trailer in Greencastle, in south-central Pennsylvania.

The eggs were stolen at around 8:40 p.m. from a facility operated by Pete & Gerry’s Organics, according to a police report.

“The thieves could sell them or even use them for vandalizing purposes,” Trooper Megan Frazer, a State Police spokeswoman, said in an email on Wednesday. “We don’t know what purpose of stealing 100,000 would be for at this time. With the extreme increased price of eggs, someone may have thought they could sell them.”

“The only thing similar I have encountered during my career,” she added, “was a stolen trailer full of ‘tainted chickens.’”

Eggs have been a prominent feature in the national news cycle. Their rising cost was a talking point in the presidential campaign. Suppliers are warning about the impact of avian influenza on availability and prices. And this week, Waffle House introduced a 50-cent surcharge on every egg it serves. (The chain says it serves more than 272 million eggs a year.)

In Pennsylvania, the trail has gone quiet, at least publicly, since the nighttime raid. But at a time when shoppers across the country are facing empty shelves and higher prices when shopping for eggs, the theft has drawn outsize attention to what would ordinarily be seen as a local event.

“This egg theft incident is definitely unusual and has gained national attention,” Trooper Frazer said.

With no new information to report since the theft, local and national news organizations this week are trying to engage readers with egg puns.

Thieves “poached” the eggs from a truck, leaving Pete & Gerry’s “shell shocked,” The New York Post reported. “Pa. police scramble to crack case,” Cleveland.com said in a headline, adding that the investigation would take some “hard-boiled” detective work.

The theft also generated buzz on social media and in public forums as commentators speculated about the logistics of a bulk egg theft.

“100k eggs can’t be easy to conceal or ‘move,’” one person wrote in Reddit’s main news forum.

The thieves “need to meet up with the dudes who orchestrated the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist and make breakfast,” another person, apparently an optimist, wrote.

Pete & Gerry’s Organics, an egg producer that works with family farms to distribute eggs to retailers, said on Wednesday that it was increasing security and surveillance to “help prevent this from happening again.”

It was not immediately clear how so many eggs could be removed from the vehicle and what the thieves intended to do with them, but they possibly did not get to all of the cargo. Eggs are generally shuttled around in cases, in cartons or on pallets, said Karyn Rispoli, the egg managing editor at Expana, a firm that tracks commodity prices.

“Generally a full trailer load of large eggs probably is between $150,000 to $200,000,” she said in an interview. “It depends on what’s in there.”

Grocery stores and restaurants are now paying around $7.79 for a dozen Midwest large eggs, the industry standard, up from $3.33 a year ago, according to Expana.

Prices have been spiking partly because of inflation, but also because of avian influenza, or bird flu, which made its way to the United States in 2022 after it was detected in Canada.

The impact is being felt in households and businesses. Waffle House said this week that consumers and restaurants were being forced to make difficult decisions.

Trucking costs are also going up.

“The higher these prices go obviously the truckloads become increasingly expensive,” Ms. Rispoli said.

She said that the theft of $40,000 worth of eggs was being widely reported because of the economics behind it.

“I think it highlights the underlying problem, but I don’t know that it is necessarily very salacious in its scale,” she said. “The idea that eggs have gotten so difficult to find, and so expensive that somebody is actually willing to steal them, is the bigger thing of note.”