France

France is the European Union's largest egg producer, and eggs are among the few staple foods in which the country is essentially self-sufficient. That scale did not shield it from the European avian-influenza waves of the mid-2020s, which repeatedly struck the dense poultry-farming regions of western France and pushed prices higher across the continent.

The larger structural factor is the transition to higher-welfare housing. Under EU rules and far-reaching retailer commitments, France has been phasing out cage systems: the share of hens in alternative housing — barn, free-range and organic — has risen above three-quarters, and most supermarket chains no longer sell cage eggs under their own brands at all. Free-range and Label Rouge eggs now dominate store shelves, and they are structurally more expensive to produce than the cage eggs they replaced.

That is the principal reason French retail prices sit above those of southern-European neighbours such as Spain and Portugal in this index. The figure reflects prices observed daily at Carrefour France, using the per-egg unit price displayed on the shelf to avoid distortions from differing pack sizes, and it has tracked closely with Eurostat's official French average.