SEPRA Market Report - 6th March 2015

The market, right now there is no market, as there is as good as no eggs available, certainly home produced ones.
 
Although it looks like a no change price wise, the comment is if we had any spare eggs they would be considerably dearer, packers and wholesalers are scouring the country for eggs.
 
The only eggs available are imported with Polish and Spanish available in Scotland we have heard of Spanish on offer at Large 67p Medium 63.5p with a best before date considerably longer than the EU legal requirement.
 
All the big packers are short ordering their supermarket customers as demand has increased so much with all the price cutting.
 
Is it going to be a blood bath or the best thing for our industry, it started with Tesco saying that they would match prices with Aldi, there egg sales shot up, now Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Asda have followed suit, we all know that the big supermarkets have been steadily hiking the percentage mark up on their eggs for a great many years, if this is being reduced to a more realistic level without forcing the price down to their suppliers this could be good with demand increasing consistently with eggs.
 
Supermarkets used to go for higher volume and lower mark up when they were gaining market share, but once achieving dominance it has been increase mark up and squeeze suppliers for mega profit.
 
But if the supermarkets decide to squeeze their suppliers further as they will be well aware that the market will come back into balance with possibly surplus in early summer we might well have a blood bath.
 
But the so called discounters, are reducing their prices with several offering 15 egg packs from £1.00 to £1.19 as they wish to hold and increase their market share as Aldi as an example who market throughout the EU have the dearest eggs in Britain and the cheapest in Germany and Spain so have the ability to reduce prices even further and as they are privately owned are happier with a much lower profit while our big supermarkets are all PLC’s and require large profits to keep their city investors happy.
 
Is this the stick that will break their back and control?