NC to Receive 3M Eggs as Attorney General Jeff Jackson Reaches Settlement with Egg Producers in Bipartisan Antitrust Case

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
Contact: comms@ncdoj.gov
919-538-2809

RALEIGH — Three major producers will donate about 3 million eggs to food banks in North Carolina after they reached a settlement with Attorney General Jeff Jackson, 16 other bipartisan attorneys general, and the United States. The settlement resolves allegations that the egg producers violated antitrust laws by manipulating the information that helps set egg prices in the United States. Food banks across the country will receive about 50 million eggs. The egg distribution plan will be developed in the coming weeks in consultation with the states.

“These egg producers worked together to game the system so they could charge more for eggs. That’s against the law,” said Attorney General Jeff Jackson. “This settlement makes sure they can’t rig the market anymore, and food banks in our state will get millions of eggs to help feed people who are hungry.”

North Carolina, 16 other states, and the U.S. Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation into three egg producers — Cal-Maine Foods, Hickman’s Family Farms, and Versova — in early 2025.

Large buyers, such as grocery stores and restaurants, typically buy eggs at prices tied to industry benchmarks. The prices consumers then pay for eggs are closely connected to those benchmark prices. According to the complaint, the three producers worked together between 2022 and 2025 to share information and coordinate on bidding to manipulate the key benchmark and artificially inflate the price of eggs. For example, in December 2022, Hickman’s CEO emailed Versova and Cal-Maine executives and urged them to submit “strong bids, early and often” to push the benchmark higher. All three companies then submitted dozens of bids at higher prices, which led to the benchmark prices increasing.

Attorney General Jeff Jackson, a bipartisan coalition of 16 other attorneys general, and the USDOJ alleged that these actions violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Under the settlement, all three companies must end their illegal coordination to manipulate price benchmarks, adopt compliance measures to prevent future violations, and fully cooperate with oversight by the states. The companies must designate antitrust compliance officers who will monitor for violations of the settlement and report violations to the states and DOJ.

Attorney General Jackson has aggressively fought to protect North Carolinians from companies that violate antitrust laws, especially when those practices raise prices for everyday consumers. In June, he filed an amicus brief in a Chemours case urging an appeals court to ensure that when antitrust cases are heard, the conduct is considered in its entirety instead of on a piece-by-piece basis, which is crucial to proving anticompetitive behavior. In May, he shut down a secret data exchange that raised meat prices. In April, he won a court order temporarily freezing the Nexstar and Tegna TV merger and won a trial against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. He is also suing the software company RealPage for allegedly exploiting landlords’ competitively sensitive information to create a pricing algorithm that violated antitrust laws and raised rent prices and has reached settlements with three of six landlords to stop the use of non-public information to set rents.

Attorney General Jackson is joined in reaching the settlement by the U.S. Department of Justice and the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

Copies of the settlements are available here.

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