The average wholesale price for a dozen, white large shell eggs has dropped more than $5.00 since March 3rd, from $8.17 to $2.92.

UPPER MICHIGAN (WLUC) - The average wholesale price for a dozen, white large shell eggs has dropped more than $5.00 since March 3, from $8.17 to $2.92. While the USDA weekly report says it’s unclear if those lower prices will translate to the store yet, Super One Foods Marquette’s store manager says demand has increased.

“People are coming back into the egg market a little bit,” said Mike LaVigne. “Realizing that pricing is down and making that part of their daily shopping expense now.”

Egg prices rose 19% from January to February, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But LaVigne says he tried to make prices manageable.

“As we saw prices increasing, we absorbed a lot of those costs and we’re making very small percentages on those eggs to pass the savings along and try to keep the cost down for our customers,” LaVigne said.

LaVigne says his local egg producers are swapping out their chickens. More local eggs will be at the Marquette location in a week or two.

A primary reason egg prices skyrocketed is the largest bird flu outbreak since 2015. Over 30 million birds have been lost to avian influenza just this year.

The Michigan Allied Poultry Industry Executive Director says they’re working with farmers to find better safeguards.

“We have seen farms that have become hit that have very high biosecurity, so, we need something else to protect the hens and, absolutely, what we are looking for is a vaccine,” said Nancy Barr.

Barr says there is economic risk to using vaccines on poultry in the U.S. Exports could be affected. But she says that risk isn’t significant enough to have farmers go out of business.

“We produce a lot of food in this country, and we feed people well and, for the most part, pretty inexpensively,” Barr said. “I think we are really at a risk of impacting that ability when we have so many farms being hit.”

The USDA has announced a $1 billion-dollar investment to combat avian flu and reduce egg prices.