The traditional reward for carolers, i.e. dyed eggs, will become significantly more expensive this Easter. Their price in stores has almost doubled in a year. Boiled eggs, prepared for poaching, or added, for example, to the dough for mason jars, we arrange almost three billion eggs per year, i.e. 263 per person. Domestic hens cannot tolerate so many of them, self-sufficiency is around 86 percent.
Eggs are an important food for both poor families and gourmets. And it is this food that has become a symbol of how the cost of living is rising across the European Union.
At the beginning of the year, egg prices within the EU were 30 percent higher year-on-year, the European statistical office Eurostat calculated. The highest increase among EU bloc countries was recorded by the Czech Republic, where, according to data, the price of eggs rose by 85 percent in January. In February, it was even 95.1 percent more year-on-year.
Not almost twice as much as in the Czech Republic, but still by a significant 79.2 percent, the price of eggs in Hungary rose. In Germany, for example, the price increase was lower than the EU average, for February it was 16.6 percent year-on-year. Less than the European average, eggs also became more expensive in Cyprus, Luxembourg and Austria.
The following graph compiled for the weekly Ekonom maps the development of egg prices on the shelves of Czech stores according to data from the Czech Statistical Office. At the same time, he compares them with the prices at which farmers sold them in the last year.
The next graph shows that the consumption of eggs in the Czech Republic remains relatively stable. The average Czech Republic organized a total of 263 of them in 2021.
However, Czech hens alone cannot meet the demand of domestic customers. Eggs are most often imported from Poland, Latvia and neighboring Slovakia.
From the data of Czech statistics and the Ministry of Agriculture, it is possible to compile a ranking of the regions where hens lay the most.
The first place in this case belongs to the Pilsen region, where one hen laid an average of 325 eggs last year. Prague and Central Bohemia finished in second place with 322 eggs per henhouse, and the Zlín Region finished third with 320 eggs per henhouse.
