Lake Carolyn Food Settlement: Cal-Maine Eggs and Texas Claims

The Cal-Maine eggs settlement with Texas, announced January 15, 2026, ended a nearly six-year price-gouging lawsuit without a cash penalty. Instead, the nation’s largest egg producer agreed to donate 180,000 dozen eggs (roughly 2.16 million eggs) to 17 Texas food banks within 120 days, and accepted a ten-year injunction barring it from charging excessive prices for eggs during any declared disaster.¹

What Cal-Maine Agreed To

The agreed final judgment has two operative pieces. Cal-Maine had to deliver 180,000 dozen eggs to designated Texas food banks within 120 days of the January 2026 order. And for the next ten years, the company is prohibited from selling eggs at prices during a declared disaster that would violate the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The injunction also imposes recordkeeping and compliance obligations on the company.²

No money changes hands. The order also states expressly that it is not an admission or concession of liability or wrongdoing by Cal-Maine.²

Where the Eggs Went

The settlement allocates the donation across 17 food banks by size of the region they serve. The North Texas Food Bank and the Houston Food Bank each received the largest share, 30,000 dozen (360,000 eggs) apiece. The Tarrant Area Food Bank, Central Texas Food Bank, and San Antonio Food Bank were each allocated 20,000 dozen. The remaining allocations, ranging from 10,000 dozen down to 2,000 dozen, went to banks serving the Rio Grande Valley, East Texas, El Paso, the Coastal Bend, South Texas, Southeast Texas, the South Plains, West Texas, West Central Texas, the Golden Crescent, the High Plains, and Wichita Falls.¹

Feeding Texas, the statewide network of 20 food banks, welcomed the donation as a meaningful contribution during a period of persistent food insecurity.³ The 120-day delivery window closed in mid-May 2026. Publicly available records do not confirm whether every scheduled delivery was completed on time.

What Texas Accused Cal-Maine of Doing

Texas filed the lawsuit on April 23, 2020, roughly six weeks into the pandemic emergency. The suit was brought under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which prohibits selling necessities at “exorbitant or excessive” prices after a state or federal disaster declaration. Governor Greg Abbott had declared a statewide COVID-19 disaster on March 13, 2020, activating the statute.⁴

According to the state, Cal-Maine, which it described as the dominant egg supplier in Texas, used the declaration as cover to raise prices in the absence of any supply disruption. The state alleged that a dozen eggs went from about 94 cents in early March 2020 to roughly $3 later that same month, with generic eggs hitting $3.18 per dozen. That is close to a 300 percent increase in a matter of weeks.² The suit named Cal-Maine Foods, Inc. and its Texas subsidiary Wharton County Foods, LLC.

The statute Texas invoked carried real financial teeth. Available penalties included consumer reimbursement, civil fines of up to $10,000 per violation, and an additional $250,000 per violation where elderly consumers were affected.⁴ The donation-and-injunction structure sidestepped those penalties in exchange for a defined product delivery and a decade of restraint.

Why Cal-Maine’s Name Keeps Coming Up

The Texas case is not the company’s only recent legal exposure. In November 2023, a federal jury in the Northern District of Illinois found Cal-Maine and other egg producers liable in Kraft Foods Global, Inc. v. United Egg Producers, Inc. for conspiring to inflate egg product prices. The alleged conspiracy stretched from 1998 to 2008, though the court limited potential damages to 2004 through 2008.⁵ Cal-Maine maintained that the programs at issue were animal welfare initiatives consistent with industry standards. The case was terminated in November 2024.⁶

In April 2025, Cal-Maine disclosed that it had received a civil investigative demand from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division as part of a wider probe into nationwide egg price increases. The investigation followed a request from the advocacy group Farm Action, which asked federal antitrust regulators to examine whether producers had suppressed supply to keep prices high during the avian flu crisis.⁷ As of April 2026, the DOJ was reportedly preparing to file an antitrust case against several of the largest egg producers in the country.⁸

Cal-Maine’s financial results have drawn attention alongside those cases. The company reported $4.3 billion in net sales for fiscal 2025 and controls roughly 20 percent of the U.S. egg market.⁹ Through the second quarter of fiscal 2025, it reported a 342 percent increase in gross profits over the same period the prior year.⁷

How This Compares to Other State Egg Cases

Texas is not the first state to accept eggs instead of cash. In April 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James settled a similar price-gouging case against Hillandale Farms Corporation, which agreed to donate 1.2 million eggs to New York food banks. The state had alleged that Hillandale raised the price it charged grocery chains from as low as $0.59 per dozen in early 2020 to $2.93 per dozen by April of that year.¹⁰ Hillandale said its pricing tracked the Urner Barry index, the same third-party pricing benchmark now under scrutiny in the federal DOJ probe.¹¹

One boundary worth flagging for consumers: the Texas settlement is a state enforcement action, not a class action. There is no consumer claim form and no individual payout. Shoppers who paid inflated prices in spring 2020 are not compensated directly under this agreement; the remedy runs to Texas food banks and to future conduct.

1
Texas Attorney General. Attorney General Ken Paxton Secures Over Two Million Free Eggs for Texans as Part of Historic Settlement With Cal-Maine
2
Buchalter. Texas Settles Cal-Maine Egg Pricing Case
3
Feeding Texas. Feeding Texas Food Banks Welcome Major Egg Donation to Nourish Hungry Texans
4
Texas Attorney General. AG Paxton Files Lawsuit to Halt Price Gouging by Cal-Maine Foods
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Cal-Maine Foods. Cal-Maine Foods Issues Statement on Recent Court Decision
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CourtListener. Kraft Foods Global v. United Egg Producers
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ABC News. DOJ Investigating Major Egg Producers Amid Soaring Prices
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Farm Action. Farm Action Applauds DOJ Egg Pricing Case, Urges Strong Enforcement
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Cal-Maine Foods. Cal-Maine Foods
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New York Attorney General. Attorney General James Delivers 1.2 Million Eggs to New Yorkers
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ABA Journal. Company Donates 1.2M Eggs to Food Banks as Part of Lawsuit Settlement