May 25/Food Weekly Focus -- American consumers continue to buy "regular" eggs over cage-free eggs by a margin of 40-to-1, according to data from Information Resources Inc. (IRI), which tracks checkout scanner data from 34,000 grocery, drug and mass merchandiser stores across the U.S.
"Regular" eggs produced in traditional cage housing systems continued to be the most popular eggs among supermarket shoppers, accounting for 92% of the 21 billion eggs bought at retail last year, according to the IRI data. According to the data, cage-free eggs only account for 2% of all retail eggs bought, and organic/free range eggs accounted for only 1%t. Sales of all three types of eggs were relatively flat compared to the previous year, with organic/free range egg sales falling by 1.67%, cage free eggs up slightly (by 1.25%) and regular eggs down less than 1%, all of which are statistically immaterial changes from the previous year.