Korea's egg producers fined for inflating prices, antitrust regulator says

Korea's antitrust regulator has fined the country's main egg producers' association for artificially inflating egg prices, it said Thursday. 

The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) issued a corrective order and fined the Korean Egg Producer Association 594 million won ($396,000) for violating fair trade law. 

The association used regional subcommittees between January 2023 and January this year to periodically set and distribute benchmark prices to producers across the country, according to the FTC. Because eggs are perishable, they are typically traded directly between farms and distributors rather than through wholesale markets — meaning the association's published benchmark effectively functioned as the industry's pricing anchor. 

The regulator's concern is that these figures were not simply reflecting market rates, but were instead acting as a kind of price guideline that incorporated producers' hoped-for future prices.

Between 2023 and 2025, the production cost of a tray of 30 eggs actually fell, from 4,060 won to 3,856 won. Yet the association's benchmark price moved in the opposite direction, rising from 4,841 won to 5,296 won over the same period. 

The gap between production cost and benchmark price effectively widened from 781 won to 1,440 won. Average consumer prices followed suit, climbing from 6,491 won per tray in 2023 to 6,792 won in 2025. 

"Setting the benchmark price at a level significantly above production costs caused a cascading rise in wholesale and retail prices," an FTC spokesperson said.

The association has pushed back strongly. It argues that rising egg prices were driven by a reduction in laying hen populations due to avian influenza outbreaks and higher feed costs, not by its benchmark pricing. It has also characterized the FTC investigation itself as "retaliatory," claiming it was triggered after the association refused a request from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs last June to lower prices as part of the government's efforts to bring down inflation.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.

AHN HYO-SEONG [[email protected]]