Business
With bird flu still affecting egg prices, brunch in L.A. may soon cost more
Ongoing egg shortages in California due to the spread of bird flu among livestock are bringing another early 2025 challenge to local restaurants, especially brunch spots that rely heavily on eggs for menu items.
It’s also unclear how the ongoing fire disasters that erupted Tuesday could affect eggs and other staple ingredients. But, in light of difficult times overall for the industry and a traditionally slow January, some restaurateurs earlier this week said they have already been forced to raise prices for diners, or are weighing whether to do so, according to multiple interviews.
In San Luis Obispo, Philip Lang, who has operated Bon Temps Creole Café for nearly 30 years, said he increased the price on egg items on his menu right before Christmas. For instance, a $15 menu item now costs $17 for two eggs.
Before the bird flu outbreak, he paid $20 for a case of 15 dozen conventional eggs. Since bird flu, the price has kept doubling, starting from about $50 to now about $110 a case.
“Eggs go into all of our dishes,” he said of his restaurant that only opens for breakfast and lunch. “We make our hollandaise with eggs and dressings with eggs.”
He said most diners are understanding but some still express disappointment.
In Irvine, eggs go in just about every dish at Burnt Crumbs, from bestselling Japanese-style soufflé pancakes to the breakfast fried rice, said chef-owner Paul Cao. On an average week, Cao said his kitchen goes through 180 to 225 dozens of eggs. Cao is now having to pay more than double compared to three months ago — up to $130 for a case of 15 dozen eggs.
The H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus continues to spread across the globe, curtailing egg supply and making them more expensive and difficult to find. There’s no sign of relief, with scientists and health officials fearing we’re on the verge of another global pandemic. In California, egg prices have soared to $8.97, a 70% increase in the last month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Cao said he doesn’t plan to raise prices for now. “I’ll give it until March — first quarter 2025, if this doesn’t trend in the right direction, we will have to raise prices. We can’t keep eating costs,” he said.
He’s afraid of losing customers but said he can’t sustain the price increase for long. “When egg prices go up $2 per dozen, that costs us a couple thousand a month,” he said.
Chef Walter Manzke, second from left, and the kitchen team at République in Los Angeles. The restaurant, like many others, is weighing increasing the cost of some egg dishes as the bird flu outbreak continues to affect egg prices.
(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)
Walter Manzke, who co-owns République with wife and partner Margarita Manzke, said he feels lucky that he can still procure good eggs from his distributor despite the shortage.
He doesn’t expect to raise prices on his menu yet but is definitely feeling the squeeze because so many of his well-known dishes use eggs — including his popular French toast.
“We’re just doing the best we can,” he said of the Hancock Park restaurant that ranked No. 4 last year on The Times’ 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles guide. “Compromising on quality is not an option.”
On Friday, Delilah Snell, who operates Alta Baja Market, temporarily raised prices to her egg dishes by $1 at her restaurant and market in Santa Ana.
Snell is now paying $131 for a case of 15 dozen free-range organic brown eggs. In October, she paid around $70. She said she could pay less for lower-quality eggs but doesn’t “want to compromise the quality” her customers have come to expect.
On the front counter menu of her store, she posted a sign that reads: “Over the past few weeks, our prices have gone up 40% (and are continuing to rise) because of the bird flu. As a result we need to add a $1 surcharge to all dishes with eggs to cover this expense to still provide you with a high-quality product.”
Once prices drop, she said, she’ll remove the surcharge.
The spike in egg prices comes on the heels of a slow COVID-19 pandemic recovery, as many restaurants in Southern California continue to struggle.
Lang of Bon Temps said there is now a notice on top of the menu that alerts customers to the $1 temporary increase per egg.
The notice reads: “Due to the bird flu that has caused the price of eggs to quadruple in recent months, we find it necessary to add a surcharge of a dollar per egg for all dishes containing eggs until the price of eggs comes down. We regret each time we are forced to raise any of our prices. Please know that we are not doing this for profit, only to maintain our business during these difficult times. Thank you for your understanding.”
Lang said he plans to do away with the surcharge once prices go down to about $50 for a case of 15 dozen eggs.
The cost of eggs soared by 70% in the last month in California, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
(Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press)
As egg prices tick up, several shoppers are also reporting shortages.
On Tuesday afternoon, Cao said the egg shelves at Song Hy market in Little Saigon in Garden Grove were more than half empty. The store, known for its inexpensive groceries, was selling cage-free medium eggs for $8.99 a dozen, according to a video he provided.
Around the same time, an egg cooler at a Trader Joe’s in Irvine was already nearly half empty after having just received a fresh shipment late that morning, one shopper said. A day earlier, at a nearby Costco, Cao said there was a line of at least 12 people waiting to grab a case of a dozen eggs from shelves that were half empty.
Some restaurant owners, such as Jasmin Gonzalez, who runs Breezy in San Juan Capistrano, have opted to raise prices on other menu items and avoid a price hike on the restaurant’s popular egg dishes.
Her restaurant — which serves a Filipino-inspired brunch — will be closed for a couple weeks for a remodel, she said, and she’ll likely raise prices on some items once it opens, mostly on higher-margin items, such as coffee. That would help the restaurant offset the price of eggs and other increased costs, including the statewide minimum-wage increase, she said.
Gonzalez said she doesn’t feel comfortable changing the price of her $14.99 breakfast burrito, a bestseller.
“I don’t want people paying $16 or $17 for breakfast burritos,” she said. “I don’t like the way that feels.”
Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.
The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.
One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.
As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.
Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.
“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.
In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.
Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.
Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.
The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.
It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.
Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.
As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.
“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
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