Waffle House drops its egg surcharge
Waffle House had a welcome announcement for customers of its round-the-clock breakfast offerings: it has officially taken its egg surcharge off the menu. (Photo credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images via CNN Newsource
New York (CNN) — Waffle House had a welcome announcement for customers of its round-the-clock breakfast offerings: it has officially taken its egg surcharge off the menu.
The Georgia-based chain that maintains an eerily accurate index for natural disasters may also now be providing a barometer for America’s food prices. The soaring price of eggs due to a severe outbreak of the bird flu led Waffle House to add a 50-cent surcharge to every egg it sold in February.
It was a hefty surcharge for the chain’s most-ordered item: Waffle House says on its website it serves 272 million eggs a year (that’s more than its 153 million hash browns and 124 million of its namesake waffles).
After months of surging egg prices, they finally began falling in the spring. Egg prices fell 12.7% in April, and the USDA reported that a dozen large white-shell eggs now cost less than $3.
“On my first day as Secretary, we got to work to implement a five-pronged strategy to improve biosecurity on the farm and lower egg prices on grocery store shelves. The plan has worked, and families are seeing relief,” said US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in a statement last week.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency handles natural disasters in an interesting way. Waffle House restaurants are famous for staying open during disasters, and close if an event is particularly bad. FEMA internally uses an unofficial “Waffle House Index” to track dangerous events.
The BLS said egg prices were still more expensive than they did a year earlier, but the decline was enough for chains like Waffle House to cut their surcharges.
The chain operates more than 2,000 restaurants.
“Egg-cellent news…as of June 2, the egg surcharge is officially off the menu. Thanks for understanding!,” the company said in an X post Tuesday.
CNN’s Jordan Valinsky and David Goldman contributed to this report.
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