Urner Barry

Okay, let's get into this.

There's a company called Urner Barry.

It was founded in eighteen fifty-eight, which makes it older than the light bulb.

It's based in Toms River, New Jersey, and it publishes daily price quotes for proteins like beef, pork, poultry, seafood, and even eggs.

If you're a grocery store, a restaurant chain, or a food distributor buying eggs by the truckload, your contract almost certainly references the Urner Barry price.

Billions of eggs are sold every year at prices tied to what Urner Barry says that they're worth.

Now, let's get to how Urner Barry arrives at that number.

Every day, egg producers submit bids on something called the Egg Clearing House, which is a spot market where producers buy and sell eggs amongst themselves.

It's the stuff you learn in Economics 101 before they spend the next three years teaching you excuses for why it never works like that.

Urner Barry takes anonymized data from this exchange and produces an aggregate daily price quote based on region and size.

Urner Barry gets information for direct trades that occur outside of ECI.

Those Urner Barry numbers are, in turn, used to determine the prices paid in contracts for large egg companies that they have with retailers or restaurants.

The complaint goes on to detail how, from 2022 to 2025, the three giant egg companies conspired to submit a large number of bids, often in the hours leading up to Urner Barry publishing a price quotation, and many of which they knew would not be successful.

If you're old enough to remember bidding up something your buddy was selling on eBay, this is a very analogous behavior.

Don't you love capitalism? Talking of how great capitalism is, it's time for a commercial break.

Here's one example.