How this is built
Methodology
What data The Scramble pulls, where it comes from, and how often it refreshes.
What we pull, and from where
Prices and inventory come from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service Egg Market News reporting API:
- the daily National Shell Egg Index, the national wholesale benchmark,
- the weekly Combined Regional report plus the New York and California reports, the regional wholesale ranges,
- the weekly Shell Egg Inventory, the supply gauge,
- the weekly Grocery Store Egg Feature Activity report, the retail-ad read,
- and the weekly National Egg Products report, the breaking-market prices, in the API from August 2025.
Four more sources ride alongside. Frozen-egg cold storage comes from USDA NASS, published monthly. The US table-egg flock and egg production come from USDA NASS's Chickens and Eggs report, monthly, the supply side beneath the prices. Retail egg prices come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, monthly back to 1980: the average price shoppers pay for a dozen large grade A eggs, plus the egg and all-items consumer price indexes for inflation context. That is a consumer mixed-basket price and is never compared to the wholesale benchmark as if they were the same market. The bird-flu tracker comes from the USDA APHIS confirmed-detections record, filtered to the egg sector and updated as detections are confirmed. USDA rebuilt its shell-egg price reporting in early 2025, so the wholesale price series reach back to then; the inventory series run years deeper.
How often
The pull runs weekly, ahead of the Tuesday brief. Each pull covers a trailing window, not just the newest day, so a missed run backfills on the next one. Every data page carries two dates: "data through" is the newest reading in the data itself, and "page updated" is when the page was last rebuilt.
For how to read the numbers once they are in front of you, see how to read this.
Republishing our charts and statistics
The charts and statistics on The Scramble are free to republish. Use them in an article, a report, a class, a presentation, or a post — you do not need to ask us first. We ask one thing in return: credit The Scramble with a visible link back to the page you took the figure or chart from, and keep that link live.
Every chart has an Embed chart button with a snippet you can paste straight into a web page. Because it points at the live image, the chart you embed today keeps updating itself as new data lands — you never have to swap in a fresh screenshot. Every data page, guide, and issue has a Cite button that hands you a ready-made citation line, including the date the data runs through. If you are quoting a number, keep that date: it is what tells your reader how current the figure is.