# The US egg products market > The US egg products market is the part of the egg business that never reaches a carton: shell eggs broken and sold as liquid, frozen or dried egg, by the pound, to manufacturers and foodservice. USDA prices nine of those lines every week. _Updated Aug 20, 2026._ The US egg products market is the part of the egg business that never reaches a carton. Shell eggs are broken at a processing plant and sold as liquid, frozen or dried egg, priced by the pound rather than by the dozen, to food manufacturers, bakeries, foodservice distributors and institutional buyers. Roughly speaking, if you did not buy the egg in a shell, you bought an egg product. This guide is the map of that market. For which eggs end up in a breaker rather than a carton, and how the two channels bid against each other for the same egg, read [breaking stock and the egg products market](/guides/breaking-stock-and-the-egg-products-market). For a single segment in depth, there is [the liquid egg market](/guides/the-us-liquid-egg-market), [the egg powder market](/guides/us-egg-powder-market) and [the scrambled egg mix market](/guides/us-scrambled-egg-mix-market). ## What counts as an egg product "Egg product" is a regulatory term, not a marketing one. Under the Egg Products Inspection Act and its regulations at 9 CFR part 590, an egg product is egg that has been removed from the shell and processed, which puts it under continuous federal inspection in a way a carton of shell eggs is not. Part 590 sets which shell eggs may be broken in the first place (590.510), requires pasteurization (590.570) and requires plants to sample final packaged product for Salmonella and hand every result to inspection personnel, positives immediately (590.580). That inspection regime is the reason the segment behaves differently from the shell market. A breaking plant is a food manufacturing operation with a continuous federal presence, not a packing shed, and the product leaving it is an ingredient with a specification rather than a commodity in a case. ## The three segments **Liquid** is the largest and the most actively traded. Egg is broken, separated where required, pasteurized and shipped chilled in totes and tank trailers, usually to a buyer within a few days' drive. USDA prices liquid whole, liquid whites and liquid yolk weekly, in cents per pound, and reports caged and cage-free separately. **Frozen** is the storage form. The same liquid, frozen into cans or blocks, holds for months instead of days, which makes it the outlet for surplus when breaking runs ahead of demand. USDA prices frozen whole and frozen whites, and separately the two treated yolk products, sugared yolk and salted yolk, which are stabilised for baking and confectionery use. NASS cold storage holdings are the other half of that picture and show a real seasonal shape. **Dried** is the smallest and the longest-lived. Water is removed to leave a shelf-stable powder that ships without refrigeration and keeps for a year or more. USDA prices dried whole and dried yolk, and unlike the liquid lines it quotes them in dollars per pound. [The egg powder market](/guides/us-egg-powder-market) covers that segment on its own. ## What USDA actually prices, and what it does not The weekly AMS national egg products report carries nine product lines and no more: three liquid, four frozen, two dried. Every one of them is a weighted average of confirmed negotiated trades, which has two consequences worth holding onto. The first is that a thin line prints irregularly. When too few trades are confirmed in a week, AMS publishes nothing rather than a thin number, so the dried lines in particular can go weeks between quotes. An absent price is a statement about trade volume, not a data outage. The second is that plenty of real products have no published price at all. Scrambled egg mix, egg patties, precooked omelettes and every branded blend are manufactured from these inputs and sold on contract, and no USDA quote covers them. A buyer pricing one of those works back from the liquid whole egg quote, which is what [the scrambled egg mix market](/guides/us-scrambled-egg-mix-market) walks through. [Chart: National liquid whole egg price (cents per pound)](https://the-scramble.com/products/liquid-whole) ([data](https://the-scramble.com/products/liquid-whole.md) — chart image: https://the-scramble.com/charts/products/liquid-whole/chart.png) ## How a processed price tracks its shell input Egg products are priced per pound and shell eggs per dozen, so the two only connect through yield. AMS publishes the bridge in its weekly report on shell eggs processed under federal inspection: how many cases were broken, and the pounds of liquid recovered per case. Divide the pounds by the dozens and you have the conversion that turns a cents-per-pound quote into a cents-per-dozen equivalent, which is the arithmetic a breaker does every time it decides what it can pay for shell stock. The relationship is not a fixed markup in either direction. When shell demand runs hot, cartoning can outbid breaking for the same eggs and the input cost under the whole products market rises. When shell demand softens, more eggs move into the breaking channel and the pressure runs the other way. Watching the [national large white benchmark](/national/large-white) against the liquid whole egg quote is the cheapest read on which way that pull is running. ## Who buys Manufacturers are the anchor. Bakeries, mayonnaise and dressing producers, pasta and noodle makers, confectioners and prepared-food plants all buy egg as an ingredient and want it in a form a pump can move. Foodservice distributors buy liquid and frozen for kitchens that want portion control and no shell handling. Institutional feeding, including school meal programs supplied through USDA Foods, buys across all three segments. Export takes a share, and it is proportionally largest in dried, which travels well. ## What the record does not say Searches for "egg products market" often want a market size, a growth rate or a supplier ranking. USDA does not publish any of those. What the public record carries is prices, the volume of shell eggs broken, cold storage holdings and trade data, which is a more useful basis for a decision than a market valuation but is not the same thing. Anything on this site that looks like a market size is a figure USDA published and is labeled with the report it came from. ## Related data + guides - [Liquid whole egg price](https://the-scramble.com/products/liquid-whole) - [Breaking stock and the egg products market](https://the-scramble.com/guides/breaking-stock-and-the-egg-products-market) - [The US liquid egg market](https://the-scramble.com/guides/the-us-liquid-egg-market) - [The US egg powder market](https://the-scramble.com/guides/us-egg-powder-market) - [National shell egg benchmark](https://the-scramble.com/national/large-white) ## Common questions ### What is the US egg products market? The part of the egg business that sells egg outside the shell: liquid, frozen and dried egg, priced by the pound and sold to manufacturers, bakeries, foodservice and institutional buyers. It is regulated separately from shell eggs under the Egg Products Inspection Act, which puts breaking plants under continuous federal inspection. ### What are the segments of the egg products market? Three. Liquid is the largest and most actively traded, shipped chilled and used within days. Frozen is the storage form and the outlet for surplus breaking. Dried is the smallest and the longest-lived, a shelf-stable powder that ships without refrigeration. USDA prices nine lines across the three: liquid whole, whites and yolk; frozen whole, whites, sugared yolk and salted yolk; dried whole and yolk. ### How big is the US egg products market? USDA does not publish a market size, and no figure on this site invents one. What the public record does carry is prices for the nine quoted product lines, the number of cases of shell eggs broken each week under federal inspection, cold storage holdings and trade data. Those are the measurable series, and they answer most of the questions a market size is usually a proxy for. ### How are egg product prices related to shell egg prices? Through yield. Egg products are quoted in cents or dollars per pound and shell eggs in cents per dozen, so converting between them takes the pounds of liquid recovered per case broken, which AMS publishes weekly. The link is not a fixed markup: when shell demand is strong, cartoning outbids breaking for the same eggs and raises the input cost under the products market, and when it softens the pull reverses. ### Why does USDA sometimes publish no price for an egg product? Because every quote is a weighted average of confirmed negotiated trades. When too few trades are confirmed in a week, AMS publishes nothing rather than a number backed by almost no volume. The dried lines go quiet most often. A missing quote is information about how thinly that product traded, not a gap in the reporting. --- Canonical URL: https://the-scramble.com/guides/us-egg-products-market