If a bacon, egg and cheese Hot Pocket is the Cadbury Egg of breakfast pastries, Nancy P's Cafe & Bakery's bacon, egg and cheese pocket is the Fabergé egg. On a recent morning in the bakery off Newport Avenue, owner Katy Clabough made mention of the skyrocketing price of eggs. Would all of Nancy P's breakfast pockets be eggless soon? No, assures Clabough, but eggflation is the reason the morsels now cost $11.50 when they were under $10 in late 2024.
Nancy P's is not alone. Even Waffle House — the southeast United States's version of Bend's Original Pancake House — recently implemented a 50-cent surcharge per egg. And while Waffle House may have some 2,000 locations, Nancy P's baker and Clabough's husband, Tommy Clabough, made roughly 55,000 egg pockets last year, making it the cafe's best-selling item.
While it's not just eggs — the price of everything in a baker's pantry keeps going up, from flour to butter to the very packaging all those scones and cookies go in when customers take them to go — that have become a financial pain point, eggs are naturally the focal point. After all, the current president made it a cornerstone of his campaign that they're too expensive, and in his short return to office, instead of wielding his power to halve the cost, the price has doubled.
A Facebook group called Costco Bend Deals had taken to sharing news not of how much eggs cost at the big-box store, but whether or not they were even available. And exacerbating the egg debacle is the long-lasting outbreak of bird flu, as reported locally by OPB.
Clabough says she was paying $78 for a case (15 dozen or 180 eggs) of local, organic eggs in December. After a stint paying close to $180, she says they have started to come down. Nancy P's goes through roughly 10 cases per week, she says. "We were eating it all that time," Clabough says. "It was more important to have other people, our customers, still be able to afford to come here."
A mile away at Village Baker off SW Century Drive, which opened four years ahead of Nancy P's in 1997, founder Lauren Kurzman is taking the inflation in stride. "Everything is higher than it's ever been," she says. But such is the case with all commodities. Leafing through invoices from the past few years kept by Kurzman's mother, LeAnn, Village Baker shows that it paid $47 for a case of eggs in early 2022, and $99.50 a year later. It was down to $74.25, or 25% less, a year after that, meaning one year ago. Of course, Village Baker is paying double that these days.
"I look at the highest cost and set prices on that. I'm not raising them in an emergency for the next few months." She says she's paying about 25% more for butter now and nearly triple for flour. When there's more flour and butter in her treats than eggs, even in egg-heavy menu items like her signature shortbread cookies, eggs aren't top of mind.
Of course, not all bakeries double as cafes the way Nancy P's does. And not every bakery goes through the same amount of these primary commodities. And, typically, reactionary price increases are like gravity: When they go up, they usually come back down, too.
Back at Nancy P's, Clabough just wants this egg epoch to end and Bend's telltale kindness to continue: "People understanding that these issues facing small businesses are real and changing all the time," Clabough says. "So be kind. No small business owner is raking in cash hand over fist by raising the price by a buck."
