The Backyard Chicken Boom: A Pandemic-Era Story
The COVID-19 pandemic created both opportunities and challenges for the backyard chicken industry, triggering an exponential increase in backyard chicken farming as a whole. People working from home suddenly had the hours to manage a small flock, and disrupted supply chains made the case for growing your own protein feel urgent and reasonable. Hatcheries across the country sold out of popular layer breeds, and online forums dedicated to chicken-keeping saw membership surge.
While backyard chicken ownership had already been on the rise throughout the 2010s, driven by concerns about animal welfare, industrial agriculture, unhealthy additives in food, or simply the desire for animals in people’s lives, these numbers spiked further during the pandemic. The enthusiasm, though, carried with it some hard financial lessons. Anyone who thought that keeping their own flock would be cheaper than buying eggs at the store was likely in for a rude awakening.
Rising Costs Are Quietly Pushing People Away
The economics of backyard chicken-keeping looked a lot more attractive in 2020 than they do in 2026. Feed prices climbed significantly between 2021 and 2024, with some regions reporting increases of more than thirty percent. That single input cost, more than anything else, has dampened enthusiasm among newer adopters who came in expecting savings.
While initial investments for backyard poultry operations are high and initial returns are low, the returns over time can be substantial – but that calculation requires patience and consistency that many newcomers underestimated. Then there’s the infrastructure. Coops, feed bins, bedding, veterinary care, and biosecurity measures all add up. Rats don’t come for the chickens; they come for spilled grain, moist bedding, and easy access to water, and backyard flocks may correlate with increased rodent activity when feed bins aren’t secured and coops aren’t cleaned.
Avian Flu and the Fragility of Egg Supply
The US has been battling bird flu since 2022, causing mass culling of poultry, and as of January 2025, the number of laying hens had fallen to 304 million, marking a two percent decline from 2024 and an eleven percent drop over five years. The downstream effect on retail prices was stark. The same dozen eggs that cost $1.32 in August 2020 set people back an average of $6.23 in March 2025, the highest eggs have ever been in the US since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking prices in the 1980s.
When a few chickens get sick in a facility that has millions of other birds, the whole flock gets wiped out – and as a nation, the US has too many eggs in one industrialized basket. Backyard flocks are not immune to avian flu either. In 2024, the CDC reported a salmonella outbreak linked to backyard poultry with 104 confirmed cases and one death across 30 states, underscoring the importance of safe sourcing and hygiene, especially when children or immunocompromised individuals are involved. For many households, the risk equation quietly shifted.
Plant-Based Proteins Step Into the Gap
Food brands are turning to plant-based egg substitutes like pea protein to combat rising egg prices, supply chain instability, and shifting consumer preferences. The timing made sense. Consumers who had been priced out of conventional eggs needed alternatives that were accessible, familiar, and easy to cook with. Plant-based options checked enough of those boxes to gain real traction in grocery aisles.
Egg prices soared, jumping fifty-three percent between January 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, and the plant-based egg alternative market is now expected to reach $1.5 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual growth rate of around six percent through 2035. Some plant-based products now deliver protein quantities that match or exceed what a single conventional egg provides per serving. Sustainability concerns are likely the primary driver of the alternative protein trend, as traditional meat production is associated with greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, water consumption, and other environmental issues.
Insect Protein: Niche, Efficient, and Growing Fast
Insect protein, sourced from insects like crickets, mealworms, and black soldier fly larvae, is becoming a popular, more sustainable alternative to animal-based proteins, and it can be processed into powder, meal, or oil, making it versatile for food products. The nutritional profile is genuinely impressive. Insects like crickets contain up to sixty to seventy percent protein by dry weight, making them highly efficient compared to traditional livestock-based proteins, including eggs.
Compared to cattle and pigs, insects have a faster growth rate, a higher feed-to-food conversion efficiency, lower requirements for space and water, and lower emissions of greenhouse gas and ammonia. Insects require significantly less land, water, and feed than traditional livestock, and edible insect farming generates fewer greenhouse gas emissions with a smaller environmental footprint that aligns with global sustainability goals. Still, there are significant barriers to making insect protein a mainstream solution, and in many Western cultures eating insects still triggers an averse response, even though over two billion people worldwide already consume insects as part of their regular diet.
Precision Fermentation: The Technology Changing Everything
In precision fermentation, microorganisms like yeast or bacteria are genetically modified to produce specific ingredients such as milk or egg proteins, creating identical animal proteins using microbes instead of livestock. The implications for the egg industry are significant. Companies are now able to produce functional egg proteins at scale, without a single hen involved in the process.
The Every Company, a San Francisco-based startup, uses precision fermentation to produce recombinant egg proteins that companies can use to replace chicken eggs in everything from baked goods and pasta to protein beverages and coffee syrups. Its technology enables year-round production decoupled from the livestock and feed markets, cutting out the risk of avian flu, salmonella outbreaks, and other supply shocks, while its powdered ingredients carry an eighteen-month shelf life and eliminate the need for expensive cold chains. Across precision fermentation and the wider food-tech landscape, 2025 delivered evidence that the technology could move through regulators, into factories, and onto shelves without special pleading or exceptional treatment.
Consumer Behavior Is Quietly Shifting
The growing demand for alternative proteins is particularly evident among Millennials, Gen Z, and flexitarians, all of whom are more likely to adopt new food trends, and older generations are expected to embrace the trend as well, which could push growth by 2030 even higher. The motivations are a mix of cost-consciousness, environmental concern, and simple curiosity about newer options. Sustainability is no longer a niche concern reserved for early adopters.
Even with rapid growth in popularity, alternative proteins face challenges in the food marketplace, with taste and texture chief among the criticisms, though significant food tech advancements in recent years should alleviate those concerns over time. Cost and accessibility also remain barriers to widespread adoption, as alternative proteins are typically more expensive than their conventional counterparts. Those price gaps, however, are narrowing as production scales and competition increases.
Sustainability: Where the Numbers Really Matter
The environmental case for moving away from chicken-based protein, whether commercial or backyard, is growing harder to ignore. The industrial-scale use of animals to produce food has serious environmental, health, and ethical implications, as livestock production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and drives soil depletion, water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. Even small-scale backyard production doesn’t fully escape that equation, especially when considering feed sourcing.
Seventy-five to ninety-three percent of the effects of compound feed production on global warming potential, land use, and fossil resource shortages can be avoided through alternative production systems. Precision fermentation goes even further. Onego Bio’s Bioalbumen, a fermentation-derived egg white protein, claims over a ninety percent smaller environmental footprint compared to eggs from chickens. Precision fermentation could help cut emissions, ease pressure on land and water, and make the food system more sustainable overall.
Accessibility and the Road to Mainstream Adoption
Alternative proteins have a credibility problem in some markets – not because the science is weak, but because the products haven’t always been easy to find or affordable to buy. According to the Good Food Institute’s 2024 State of Alternative Proteins report, investment in plant-based products reached $309 million, with plant-based sales topping $8 billion in 2024, though that represented a four percent dip from 2023. The dip reflects a maturing market correcting after early hype, not a collapse in demand.
The Every Company’s precision-fermented egg protein is now featured in a product at all Walmart stores across the US, marking a significant shift from co-branding to becoming a full ingredient supplier. That kind of retail placement matters. UK-based Crackd also announced it would bring its plant-based whole egg replacer to the US market, amid fluctuating egg prices and availability resulting from highly pathogenic avian influenza. Availability is catching up to ambition, one retail shelf at a time.
What This Means for the Future of Protein
Backyard chickens aren’t disappearing. For many households, they remain a source of genuine satisfaction, fresh eggs, and a connection to where food comes from that no lab-grown alternative can replicate. The return of backyard chickens isn’t just about eggs. It’s about values – how people want to live, what they want access to, and how communities evolve in response to changing needs. That’s not a trivial thing.
Yet the broader direction is clear. The alternative protein landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by technological advancements, policy changes, and consumer preferences. By the end of 2025, precision fermentation no longer needed to argue for its legitimacy – the question heading into 2026 is no longer whether it belonged, but how it will scale, compete, and integrate. The egg isn’t going anywhere, but the idea that it must come from a chicken is quietly becoming optional.
The most honest takeaway here is that the protein landscape has fractured in ways that benefit the consumer. More options, more competition, and more pressure on cost and sustainability mean that what ends up on your plate in 2030 may look quite different from what it does today. Whether you raise a flock in your backyard or buy your protein from a fermentation tank, the conversation around how we get our nutrients has permanently changed.
