The Great Egg Recession is officially upon us. The national tipping point might have been a few days ago, when Waffle House put a 50-cent surcharge on its menu. For the past few years, the egg shortage has been ramping up due to the avian flu, which has affected 22 million chickens in the U.S. The resulting egg deficit has sent pastry chefs into a panic.
“We are playing the game and trying to find the cheapest price, which last week was between $118 to $260 for a case of 180,” says Black Jet Baking Co. owner Gillian Shaw Lundgren. “For context, in recent times, eggs were usually about $69.” Other San Francisco bakers have turned to acting like linebackers, diving for fumbles in the egg section of Costco. However, a select few have been sheltered from the drama — and, in fact, are celebrating a kind of win.
Those are the vegan bakers — a surprisingly small, often maligned, subcategory.
“Until recently, I honestly didn’t know anything about it,” Danny Montoya says of the egg crisis. The co-owner of the Outer Richmond woodworking studio and cafe The Butterfly Joint (alongside his wife, Erin Feher, The Standard’s style and design editor), Montoya makes vegan, gluten-free, baked doughnuts that draw lines of people from beyond the neighborhood. He is not a vegan himself but knew there was demand for the treats, which he makes in flavors like orange bomb, chile lime, and matcha. For a binder, he uses arrowroot instead of eggs.
Hilary Knight Parker, a San Francisco-based flight attendant who runs the 5-year-old Deliciously Vegan bakery out of her home, is aware that there is an egg shortage — and equally aware that it isn’t her problem. “Eggs aren’t something that I would ever buy,” she says. A die-hard vegan, Knight Parker requires no eggs for her chocolate-peanut-butter cupcakes or Valentine’s Day-themed mini cupcakes decorated with hearts, which she makes for Mission Blue cafe in Visitacion Valley. “If people educated themselves and knew what chickens go through — it’s horrific,” she says. “Plus, I think an egg is gross. It’s literally a chicken’s period, when you think about it.”
Knight Parker feels no smugness over the egg shortage — just a hope that it will turn more people away from animal products. But Bob Trahan, the owner of Twelvemonth, a 2-year-old, plant-based restaurant and bakeshop in Burlingame, admits to feeling a teeny bit of vindication. “If you look at the standard American diet and imagine 8 billion people eating it, we simply don’t have enough land to devote to all the animal agriculture,” he says. “These animals are just so tightly packed that a virus takes out a whole crop. We can’t do things we’ve been doing and thrive as a species.”
For its scones, cookies, and other baked goods, Twelvemonth uses a plant-based egg substitute called Just Egg, which, by the way, does not save Trahan money but rather comes with a “vegan tax.” Each 16-ounce container contains the equivalent of about eight chicken eggs and retails for around $8 — a dollar an egg. Bob’s Red Mill Egg Replacer is a much less expensive option and what Vandor Hill uses at Whack Donuts, a vegan shop that opened in 2023 in the Embarcadero Center as part of SF’s Vacant to Vibrant program. Hill, who bakes in a commissary shared with other bakers, says his fellow pastry chefs are struggling with egg prices. “The other day, one of them told me, “You wouldn’t believe what I paid for eggs today,” he says.
All of this is a touchdown for vegan bakers, who have long fought for being taken seriously. Knight Parker says some people won’t even taste her baked goods, knowing they’re vegan, and Trahan has made a conscious effort to call his restaurant “plant-based” due to the stigma attached to the “V word.”
But right now, Hill — who is not a vegan (“One of my customers cried when I told her this”) — is feeling like he chose the right direction. “As a small-business owner, it has helped me save. Sometimes I have thought, what if I went old-school and started using eggs and dairy? But I’m happy that I’ve stuck to my guns.”