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This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura, and if you're in the United States, Happy Thanksgiving. Maybe you're getting ready to sit down with friends and family. Maybe there's pumpkin pie on the menu and turkey if you're a traditionalist, Well, to celebrate the holiday, we are also serving up poultry on the Big Take. Not turkey, but chicken. Our friends at odd Loots have put together a three part series called Beak Capitalism. We thought you'd
enjoy the first episode. Beak Capitalism is all about how chicken can help us understand some of the thorniest issues facing the US economy well. In this first course, Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway look at the consumer side of the chicken industry, from the chicken sandwiches war back in twenty nineteen to the rising cost of eggs. If you like it, head over to the odd Loots feed for parts two and three.
The chicken sandwich war on Twitter has people clucking all over the country.
It's chicken chaos and Milwaukee long lines outside Popeyes. If you didn't jump on that Popeyes Chicken sandwich craze. Your two Lake Popeyes is officially sold.
Out, beatings, stabbings, and even car crashes. People behaving very badly in Los Angeles and across the country for that fact, trying to get their hands on Popeyes chicken sandwich in LA two people.
On August twelfth, twenty nineteen, Popeyes released their famous chicken sandwich. It was a humble fried chicken breast with pickles and mayo on a brioche bun, priced at a very reasonable three ninety nine.
Some people called it a masterpiece, some others were just thrilled to see a delicious alternative to Chick fil A. To be honest, I can't actually remember whether I had it or not. I'll just say those are really Those are really delicious. I totally get it. I get why people love all these sandwiches.
I'm sure you were. Remember what happened after this, Joe. Dozens of imitators were launched. I mean, Taco Bell of all places, even did a version a crispy chicken sandwich. Taco and Chick fil A came out swinging. They claimed that they, and not Popeyes, were the original inventors of the chicken sandwich. Meanwhile, Popeye struggled to keep the sandwiches in stock. Fights broke out. There was even a lawsuit. A guy from Tennessee asked for five thousand dollars in
damages after he couldn't get hold of one. The chicken sandwich craze was pure mayhem or should I say mayhn.
Well, what's really important about the chicken sandwich wars is that they never really ended. Okay, you weren't seeing them hit the headlines in quite the same way anymore. But on menus around the country, chicken is more popular than ever. Burger chains have been launching chicken wings, donut chops have chicken wraps. So you might have an opinion on who ultimately won the chicken sandwich battle. But the real winner
of the war was the chicken itself. Or maybe I should say the real winner is the American eater.
Yeah, there are more chicken products on offer than ever. In fact, America's consumption of chicken continues to grow, even as appetites for other types of meat like beef, have stalled. The average American consumed a whopping one hundred and sixteen pounds of chicken in twenty twenty three, and that number is only expected to grow, making chicken by far the most consumed meat in America. Each of us is eating something like twenty adorable chickens worth of white meat every year.
And what's interesting is that's been happening even as poultry prices have surged. Freshole chicken used to cost about a dollar sixty per pound a decade ago. It now goes for almost two bucks. That's an almost twenty five percent increase and higher than the jump in broader inflation, which, as we all know, has been a huge deal in recent years.
So, speaking of inflation, egg prices have become a prime example of recent price pressures, with wholesale egg prices surging by two hundred and seven percent between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three. Chicken farmers blamed outbreaks of bird flu for the increase, but some saw it as corporate price gouging, result of a handful of powerful companies supposedly
taking advantage of consumers at a difficult time. And generally it looks like the bird flu was a big part of the story, but it did happen at a time when prices for all kinds of things we're surging so it's easy to understand why people saw it as as a macro thing.
So we have to ask what exactly has been driving the price increases in eggs and that sweet, sweet chicken. Beat, Why has the chicken industry evolved in the way that it has, and what does it say about the nature and future direction of America's economic model.
Welcome to Beat Capitalism, in which we explore some of the thorniest issues facing the US economy through the medium of chicken.
In this special three part series from all Thoughts, we are going to examine eggs.
Get it So, there's going to be chicken puns.
Huh, definitely going to be chicken puns. Get used to it. Now we are going to examine all of these questions and more, because it turns out chicken has a lot to say about things like inflation and the relationship between workers and big companies, and it creates some big existential questions about what kind of economy we actually want to have. First up, what actually happens when the price of a chicken sandwich or an egg, or even a simple chicken wing takes fight.
The chicken sandwich wars were an extremely challenging time for me as a person. It was hard on my family. It was hard of my friends, mainly because every time I had read pressed release about these things, I had to go buy one. I ate so many chicken sandwiches during that war. I was the real casualty. I'm the one that had it tough her into my you know, drive two hours to the nearest Popeyes to go try the sandwich. I didn't.
That's Justin McElroy. He's one third of the My Brother, My Brother and Me podcast, and the chicken sandwich Wars were a big deal for him. He spends part of the podcast reading out fast food press releases, and there were a lot of those flying around at this time.
A lot of American fast food competition, especially during the time period this is happening, our mid to late two thousands, is really a race to the bottom of who can sort of like reorganize the ingredients in the kitchen in the most disturbing way to try to net headlines. You know, we'll put some doritos in it. Look, we found some freedoms lying around. We shove that in it. Do you
like this? Is this anything? And a lot of it seemed pretty desperate, and I think What was so interesting about Popeyees chicken sandwich is that they had the courage as a brand to say, what if we just made something good? And that was kind of the whole hook was it was really good to eat, and it was wild, and this is just a sandwich that was It got famous for being extremely good to eat, which I think was a real breath of fresh chicken.
So, as the nation's de facto chicken war correspondent, Justin has thought a lot about why this particular combo took off like it did. Sure, there was a novelty value, and they were delicious.
I tend to believe that the best chicken sandwich is the one that's nearby.
But chicken sandwiches were also cheap.
I know we are wild about these things as a nation. Especially one of the great things is that it's cheaper than beef. So we are just wild about that, and I think we'll continue to be as long as we got all these millions of people to feed.
Chicken is still relatively cheaper than a lot of other types of meat, but that doesn't mean that prices for chicken products never went up. Today, a Popeye's Spicy chicken sandwich costs close to six dollars in many cities. That's about a fifty percent increase from its launch price of three ninety nine, and that price went up despite that intense competition among the sandwich makers.
In that respect, the chicken sandwich wars might be emblematic of some wider pricing trends. People have chicken, whether it's in sandwich form or something else. We keep buying it even as prices go up and companies keep giving us new ways to consume it.
To understand that, we need to talk about my personal favorite chicken item, wings.
But the demand for chicken wings is pushing the price to historic levels.
So how high will the cost of eating wings go?
Your Super Bowl party is going to cost about fourteen percent more than it did last year. A lot of this is the labor shortage the supply chain crunch.
Restaurants and suppliers say prices for chicken wings have gone through the roof.
It's a no brainer that Wingstop is getting in on the chicken sandwich wars, but with its own twist.
Wingstop is one of the biggest wing chains in America, and even they got into the chicken sandwich game in twenty twenty two, the company launched its own sandwich offering, introducing not just one, but a dozen different flavors of chicken and carb combos.
So we saw an opportunity to do it different, to do it the Wingstop way, and the launch was pretty incredible because we planned it out. We did all of our forecasting and we were confident we had plenty of inventory when we launched to be able to meet any sort of scenarios we could come up with around demand. But the fact was we sold out in a week, which is pretty remarkable to just see. The strategy was right, the timing was right. The only thing was wrong is
we didn't plan for that much volume. But we were able to take a step back, build up supply and relaunch again. And it has been a bit of a game changer for our brand because we're bringing in a record number of new guests into our brand quarter after quarter.
Wingstop CEO Michael Skipworth, and he says Chicken Sandwiches did a couple things for his business. They got a bunch of new customers through the door and boosted sales, of course, but there was something else too.
There's also a supply chain side of the strategy. The more breast meat that we use, which is where that chicken sandwich file at comes from, where our boneless wings come from, the better It puts us in a position to negotiate our overall buy with these poultry companies and help us execute our supply chain strategy, which is really one that's centered around in chicken wings.
And this is where we need to talk about where wings actually come from. Is it from chicken, Yes, But according to Michael, chicken wings are one of the most volatile commodities out there, and obviously they're a huge component of Wingstop's business. The company says it's the biggest customer for wings in the country.
About volatility and chicken wings and what that can do to the Wingstop restaurants, and it could be as much as a ten percentage point swing in our food cost, which is incredible amount of fluctuation. Now, the reason you see so much volatility in the price of wings is the reality of the fact that these poultry companies, they are not growing these chickens for the wings. They're setting the size of the flock, how many birds they're going
to harvest based on breast meat demand. The chicken wings themselves represent six to eight percent of the bird It's a fall off product, and so why you see so much volatility in the price of wings. It clearly is a supply and demand dynamic, but the demand is not what's driving the supply. It's really centered around the overall market for breast meat, and so that's what's created a
lot of volatility in that commodity. And there can be years where that spot market hits, you know, below one dollar a pound, and then take a year like twenty twenty one after the pandemic, where every single brand out there added chicken wings to their menu, you saw that spot market hit an all time high of three dollars and twenty one cents a pound.
Like a lot of things in the aftermath of the pandemic, the price of chicken wings soared after twenty twenty, jumping more than seventy percent between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two alone. There were the usual supply chain disruptions. A lot of poultry processors had to curb production because of worker shortages. Labor costs went up, so did chipping and packaging costs.
But there was higher demand too. Americans reacted to the trauma of the pandemic. In what I think is a very relatable way, they ordered wings, lots of them, and for chicken wings jumped when we were all isolating. After all, wings are both delicious and can be transported pretty easily. Anyone who's ever ordered a couple dozen at two am because they're the fastest and most delicious thing around probably knows this well.
At the height of the price bike, some restaurants were even labeling chicken wings at quote market price, you know, like lobster. Some grocery stores put limits on the amount of drums and flats you could purchase. For a company like Wingstop, the soaring cost of its primary product proved to be an opportunity as well as a challenge.
And for one analyst, chicken wings became key to understanding the entire economy.
I'm Sam Rynes, and I'm a necro strategist with Wisdom Tree.
Part of Sam's job is to predict winners and losers in the macroeconomy and in the years after the pandemic, if you wanted to understand who is winning, you needed to know chicken wings.
According to Sam, wings are the perfect pandemic study of all those one off disruptions, it gave companies a reason to raise their price, a strategy he calls price over volume.
Price over volume is the idea that companies coming out of the pandemic and through the Ukraine crisis used the excuses that they had to increase prices well beyond what they would have in the pre pandemic, pre Russia invasion of Ukraine period in order to maintain their margins in that environment. That came at the expensive volumes. So the idea of price over volume is companies found it much more interesting to increase prices than to attempt to maintain
their volumes over time. So your Wingstops, your McDonald's, your Burger Kings, Taco Bell, KFC. A lot of these restaurants really figured out that, you know, you kind of have it out there, that labor's getting more expensive, that your protein is getting more expensive, so you can raise prices, and you can raise prices pretty dramatically relative to what
you could previously. They learned very very quickly that it is much much cheaper to gain margin by changing a price tag than it is to invest in putting more volume out there. It flows straight to the bottom line and you don't have to move prices down anywhere near as quickly as anticipated, if at all.
At a time when there were lots of shortages and higher costs, price over volume could be a pretty compelling strategy for businesses. In twenty twenty one, as chicken wing prices were nearing their height, when we Stop said it had increased menu prices by about ten percent.
You know, they talked about how their suppliers had worked with them and so their realize costs were only up like seventy percent. Still, that's you know, you sell chicken wings and they're up seventy percent in pricing, that's a pretty big deal for you. What was intriguing about that was it gave them an excuse to raise prices, right so to Wingstop do. Wingstop raised prices, and they raised prices significantly.
Those price increases didn't necessarily mean that Wingstop was suddenly making a bucket load of chicken money, but being able to charge more did help protect their profit margins at a difficult time. As Sam points out, Wingstop wasn't unique in this respect. A bunch of other companies like Pepsi, Home Depot, even Walmart arguably did something similar.
For sam What really differentiates the price over volume idea is what happened when chicken wing prices started to come down, but Wingstop's menu prices didn't suddenly drop alongside them, so.
They raised prices. Where it began to show through was on the other side of the chicken wing crisis. Chicken wing prices fell and they fell back to where they had been previously, and they fell back, you know, call it, from almost three dollars per pound back to around eighty five cents a pound, and those are peak to kind of try off pricing. But if you think about that,
that's a pretty powerful thing. When you haven't moved your price, if your Wingstop, so you've got the chase up in price, you're not moving your price lower to kind of give back to the consumer. You're maintaining that price now. So all of a sudden, your margins have really begun to expand, and that's not going to go anywhere anytime fast.
So the price increases of the past could still be a tailwind for a business like Wingstop Today. The company says it's increasing menu prices by a smaller amount, just one to two points, which is closer to the historical average, but they're still rising and from a higher starting point too.
In an economy where consumers keep spending and entire industries are raising prices all together at the same time, prices can go up and stay there even when input prices the cost of actually making the stuff, start to fall. It's an added wrinkle in the way we think about prices, and one that could come back to rear its ugly head even as inflation has slowed.
The Meg is a twenty eighteen science fiction film about a seventy five foot megalodon, a giant shark basically that terrorizes a group of scientists working in the Pacific Ocean. For Sam rhymes, though Meg is something different that could still be pretty scary.
Is it a giant chicken?
No, here's Sam.
What companies learned was really that consumers pay attention to the Meg right and kind of the scary shark out there, which is milk, eggs, and gasoline.
That's the Meg, milk, eggs and gasoline.
And when you have egg prices that are going up dramatically and doing it very quickly, you better have an excuse to you for that price to be moving, and you better be able to explain why the cost of everything that includes eggs is also going up, whether it's mayonnaise, whether it's bread, et cetera. That's really going to have an effect on the consumer psyche. But at the same time they're not necessarily going to step back from consuming it.
So a lot of the companies out there, whether it's Pepsi, whether it's Craft Hinds, ConAgra, they found that consumer demand is rather inelastic, that there is not anywhere near the sensitivity to price that they thought there was pre pandemic, pre invasion.
People love chicken so much that even as prices go up, they keep buying. I gotta admit, Joe, my personal price elasticity for chicken wings is extremely anelastic. It is the opposite of a rubber band or a rubber chicken. If prices go up, I am definitely still buying.
Point taken. But the idea that price is and by extension, inflation might act a little differently in extraordinary times is starting to gain some traction. And Sam isn't the only one who's thinking about this.
My name is zabel A Viba. I'm an economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I've been working on inflation for a number of years, first in the context of China's transision to a market economy, which was all about structural ruptures, and then in the context of the overlapping emergencies of recent years.
The soaring price of chicken wings wasn't the result of a single thing. The events of twenty twenty clabberd supply chains and led to labor shortages. Russia invaded Ukraine in early twenty twenty two, which caused the price of grains, the basic building block of poultry feed, to go up. Then there was an outbreak of bird flu, which we'll talk more about in a second. Demand for wings spiked at that same time, and companies like Wingstop responded to
that environment by raising their prices. Put it all together, and you had a recipe for record wingflation.
Isabella says. The worry is that these types of inflationary events, which she calls overlapping emergencies, are becoming more common, and this isn't just a US phenomenon. Globally, priced for poultry are still up thirty three percent since the pandemic.
When we talk about the overlapping emergencies of recent years, I would refer to a conjunction of different things that have been kind of in the making for a while, but that have been culminating in recent years, and that are also not really going away. The first is, of course, climate change. It's no longer an issue that kind of will bother our children or grandchildren, but it's an issue that is relevant in the here and now. Global warming
is a reality. Extreme weather events have become very frequent pretty much anywhere in the world. If you ask people, can you think of an extreme weather event, they will probably be able to name one that is not very far away from them. And on top of this situation
around climate and weather, we have mounting geopolitical tensions. We have an unstable global order that is as unstable as it hasn't been in many years, if not decades, which all of these things can have implications for the stability of production networks, for the stability of distribution, and therefore ultimately for the stability of economies, societies and democracies and states and so on, which then of course has again
feedback dimensions into the degradation of the natural environment, into climate change, against climate change, and into the geopolitical environment.
There's another thing playing out too. When all these different emergencies hit the headlines, consumers hear about it, they pay attention, and so when companies decide to respond to higher input prices by raising their prices, those price increases might seem reasonable to customers, especially if everyone is doing it at the same time.
It's a different way of thinking about prices to the way we usually do in traditional economics. We tend to think about price as the result of the relationship between supply and demand. When demand is high and supply is low, prices go up, and the inverse happens too, prices go down when demand is low. Companies are supposed to compete on cost.
But when there are all these emergencies and one off disruptions and the new use price stting starts to look a little bit more complicated. If everyone has an excuse to raise prices because there's a major emergency like a global pandemic, then maybe businesses don't really feel as much pressure to lower prices.
In the context of these overlapping emergencies, and specifically in the context of tangible shocks that consumers see and listen to on the news watch on TV, such as climate disasses such as war such as supply chain blockages, like, for example, the images of the Port of la that so many consumers have seen. In that kind of context, when they walk into the store and they see that prices have gone up, they think that these price increases legitimate,
or that these price increases make sense. They don't come out of thin air. This is to say that firms navigate prices also as social relationships, as part of the relationship with their customers. And on the demand side, this means that the elasticity of demand is not god given, but it's context dependent. The willing of people to pay its context dependent.
And of course, even if prices for essentials like chicken go up, we can't just stop eating food.
Although the intermittent fasting growers might try.
We might consume less of it or try to find cheaper alternatives, but we can't stop buying it all together. And as Isabella points out, in an inflationary environment, it might even be that people spend more on basics.
Generally speaking, the more essential or the more basic good is, the lower the price. Elyticity right, you can even get that kind of perverse effects where if inflation is high and consumers fee squeeze, they might end up spending more money on essentials than on less essential goods, and hence their price elyticity for these essentials might even be declining in an inflationary environment, and I would argue that firms
are very much aware of that. If you, for example, look at the earnings costs of Tyson and the question of demand elyticity on chicken, then you see that they refer to chicken as a protein that is a staple that people have as part of their day to day diet, as their daily bread if you want so, so that
the demand elasticity is relatively low. So yes, I would argue that in the context of food and agriculture, when we talk about basic food staples, the demand elthicity tends to be relatively low, which means that if price is showed up, you do not get a strong demand response and instead you basically get a very heavy cost burden carried by consumers that cannot do without this stuff.
The meg strikes again. Not only do we pay more attention to the price of essentials like milk, eggs, and gas and chicken meat, but we don't have much of an option to stop buying them. Everything might taste like chicken, but that doesn't mean we'll all just stop buying the real deal. And speaking of essentials, let's talk eggs, the eggsentials.
My name is Clein Hickman. I'm the president of our family business, Hickman's Egg Branch in Buckeye, Arizona. We have a few million chickens and we sell eggs around the Southwest.
Glenn Hickman runs the biggest egg operation in Arizona. It's still family owned eighty years after Glenn's grandmother started the business with just a few egg laying hentons.
This our eightieth year and there's a picture hanging in my office that my dad is still alive. He's ninety five years old and he's in kind of a baby stroller with his father who is feeding some chickens that are you know, you would call cage free or free range.
Today Hickman Family Farms includes a feedmal on, a processing plant that's capable of shilling more than seven hundred and fifty thousand eggs per hour.
Size Wise, you know, Hickman's is probably larger than some and smaller than the biggest ones, but the egg business is still pretty concentrated. There's not much more than twenty or twenty five producers that really produce probably eighty five percent of the product that's out there. So you know, we have a few million chickens.
Hickman is on the supply side of the economy. He makes the things that other people are buying, in this case eggs, but his customers aren't really you and me. Instead, he's selling to the big grocery stores.
Everyone knows who they are. They're the Walmarts of the world. They're the Krogers of the world, they're the safe Ways, the all these those are national customers. And then we also have, you know, regional retailers that operate in different areas. And then you also have the institutional grocers, the national ones such as Cisco and US food Service, and then
you have regional retailers. Also beyond that, you have smaller distributors that tend to go into restaurants, you know, produce companies, meat companies, smaller institutional grocers.
In early twenty twenty three, the structure of the egg market became exciting for all the wrong reasons.
They're so bad tracing.
Look, I'm just going to say, if you don't don't like egg and chicken puns. You should already have exited the podcast.
Uh I remember this, Wholesale prices for eggs jumped. If you look at the consumer price index, egg inflation reached the stunning seventy percent year on air.
A new emergency was raging avian flu. Fresh off the back of the COVID nineteen pandemic and all those snarled supply chains, there was something new to worry about. Bird flu is highly contagious. It spreads rapidly, especially among chickens that are crowded together in commercial poultry houses. They can die within days once it strikes, and it can quickly wipe out entire flocks.
Yeah, and if there's any sign of it in a commercial bird or egg operation, chickens need to be culled. So the result of the most recent outbreak is that more than one hundred million birds have been lost in the US. That's an egg price is soaring and even turn them into a political movement, something chicken Sandwich has never really managed to achieve.
You know, we're trying to do the best we can to get more eggs out there. I think it's unfair that when politicians squawk. They use a dozen eggs as a benchmark for higher egg prices than those kind of things. And I think that's just because people relate to eggs. They're like in ninety eight percent of all refrigerators, so
they are staple. But believe me that the egg farmers in the United States are trying their ding to every single day to produce the maximum amount of eggs to satisfy the demand out there.
Okay, so what is actually happening when the price of eggs goes up? How do prices hack? So to speak?
Now you're getting into it, Joe. Okay, here's Glenn.
The egg market is kind of an unusual animal. The Board of Trade that commodities tradeline, corn, soybeans, and those kind of things. That's actual cash pricing that's transacted during the day. The egg business tends to be a little bit different. There's a national market that's quoted by a third party that has no in in either retail or production,
and they observe trades between unaffiliated parties. From there, they come up with an index that they quote each day, and the egg producers tend to sell off that index. So if the egg market is quoted up, then we go our prices go up, it quotes down and we go down. But we really don't have a lot of leverage to say, gee, I don't really care what the market is. This is what I'm going to sell my
eggs for. So we tend to all follow the same market and we negotiate deals relative to that market with our major customers.
So when Glenn is selling his eggs to a customer, a big grocery store or someone like that, he starts with an egg index price and negotiates a discount from there.
And of course that raises the question of where the egg index price comes from.
So the benchmark price is set by this third party and they collect data from many sources. Street owns a nonprofit called egg clearing House, and so it's blind trading. If I need to buy a load of eggs or I need to sell a load of eggs, I post it on this clearing house. They match buyers and sellers and that information is public. The blind trading that participants are not known, but the kind of egg is detailed, the area from which it shipped, the area from which
it delivered, and those kind of things. Additionally, we may trade privately with another producer, and when we do that, it behooves us to have accurate market quotes. So it's better to provide that information to the market reporter, whether it comes from a public trading platform or a private transaction.
Joe, which came first, the chicken or the egg price index? Okay, So when avian flu starts hitting laying flocks in the US and farmers have to coal sick chickens, it takes a while to build back.
Apply What mostly affects the price of eggs is whether or not we have enough production to meet the normal demand when you have to depopulate a flock or a farm. That's not normal in our business. Normally, if a typical farm has ten buildings and they each have one hundred thousand birds, you probably have a flock going in and out about every two months, and you have the replacement
growing capacity to accommodate that. So when you have an entire farm that goes out of production, they're cold as you say, and now you have ten barns empty without any kind of outside help. If you will, you're going to grow a barn of replacement bullets every ten weeks. So it's going to take you an entire cycle.
So supply is clearly a factor in the benchmark egg price going higher, but there's still an open question about what happens after that one t of eggs hit the shelves of grocery stores.
The bigger the customer, the higher the discount they can potentially negotiate from egg farmers like Glenn, but there are only so many companies that egg farmers can actually sell to.
The Consolidation and concentration of the grocery industry has obviously had an impact on how every industry responds to that. At one point in time, Higman's egg branch had one hundred thousand chickens, and we thought we had the bowl by the horns. We had plenty of customers that we could service. Now a large grocer can consume in a region easily the eggs from a million birds each week.
So we have these relationships now that instead of having twenty customers each buying fifty cases of eggs, we have one large customer buying the production from a million birds. So that concentration is always concerning, and.
A chicken occupies a unique position in the US diet. We eat a lot of it, whether it's eggs from the grocery store in sandwich form or takeout wings, and like many things, prices went up in recent years. Understanding what help do it can deepen the way we think about inflation in general.
Yeah, there's no single thing at play here. There's a lot of demand for chickens. People love it, people need it. And when there's lots of demand and supply gets hit by overlapping emergencies, whether it's COVID or bird flu, prices go up.
And when all those emergencies are hitting an industry all at once, when they're all in the news, companies have a reason and excuse even to raise their prices and potentially keep them there.
But recent issues facing the poultry industry illustrate a wider point about America's economy and the decisions being made about how it should be structured and who benefits from it.
Next up on Beat Capitalism, we are going from buying chicken sandwiches to the business of actually growing the birds. Welcome to the Thunderdome now with added chicken. Beat Capitalism is written by Tracy Alloway, Carmen Rodriguez, and Joe Wisenthal.
Produced and edited by Carmen with the help of Kilbrooks and Dashel Bennett. Our Old Blots theme song and sound mixing was chickenized by our engineer Blake Maples.
This meaty serving of chicken industry puns and information was fact checked by Dash and Kale.
Brendan Newnham is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
If you enjoyed this three part deep dive into the chicken industry, please consider leaving a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.
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