Is your grocery store out of eggs? Try these alternatives instead.

A global economic meltdown seems to be the only event that can cause people to cut back on meat. In the years that followed the 2007 Great Recession, the average American’s annual meat consumption fell by almost 9 percent. Milk purchases fell too.

But through it all, egg consumption remained relatively stable and kept climbing, reaching around 280 eggs per person on average in 2022.

That number could fall this year, not because people have soured on eggs, but because there aren’t enough to meet demand. Just in the last two months, 27 million egg-laying hens — 9 percent of the nation’s egg-laying hen flock — have been (brutally) killed to slow the spread of H5N1, a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu.

Shortages have doubled the cost of eggs, and inspired at least two egg heists. Despite grand promises from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to bring down the price of eggs, his own agriculture department now says their cost will continue to surge this year.

This has some shoppers — maybe you — turning to egg alternatives.

While most grocery stores now offer a wide variety of plant-based milk and meat products, there are fewer egg alternatives on the market. But there’s still plenty you can do with the plant-based egg alternatives likely available at your local grocery store, and even with more traditional kitchen ingredients, when you have fewer eggs than usual, or none.

Just Egg, a plant-based liquid egg launched by San Francisco-based startup Eat Just in 2018, is made from an ingredient that’s foreign to most Americans — mung beans — but it scrambles and functions like the real thing. The taste may not fool you, as it’s not quite as eggy (as in, stinky) and is less fatty than chicken eggs. But eggs usually aren’t eaten alone — cooking Just Egg with olive oil, garlic, onion, tomato, and a vegetable or two of your choice makes for a tasty breakfast that comes close to an egg scramble. And it has a similar amount of protein as liquid eggs from chickens per serving.

I’ve also had delicious quiches and frittatas made with Just Egg, and it can even be used to replace eggs in baking (more on this later). The company also sells pre-cooked frozen egg patties for breakfast sandwiches, and breakfast burritos.

However, Just Egg costs around $7.50 for a 16-ounce bottle, which is much more than liquid chicken eggs in part because, as I’ve written about, animal agriculture has benefited — and continues to benefit — from decades of government support that helps keep prices low.

Just Egg is by far the most popular plant-based egg: Eat Just’s CEO, Josh Tetrick, told me that in the first two months of 2025, sales grew five times faster than in the same period last year. It’s available in nearly 50,000 grocery stores and restaurants in North America — use the company’s store locator here to check availability near you.

At first glance, Simply Eggless appears practically identical to Just Egg, in that it’s a plant-based product that comes in both liquid and patty form and is made with a bean (lupin beans instead of Just Egg’s mung beans). But I’m sad to report that that’s where their similarities end. I was excited to find the product at Trader Joe’s last year, but I was quickly disappointed when I cooked with it. For one, it doesn’t scramble as well as Just Egg or regular eggs — it just gets clumpy. Second, it tastes bad. As one BuzzFeed writer put it, “These were, unfortunately, nasty. There’s no way to beat around the bush here. I actually spit them out.”

I didn’t go as far to spit it out — I soldiered on and finished my meal — but I haven’t bought it again.

AcreMade, a company partially owned by livestock giant Cargill, makes a plant-based egg product made from pea protein that is…okay. It comes in powder form, which when mixed with water can be scrambled. It has a good texture and is functionally similar to Just Egg, but doesn’t taste quite as good. It’s only available online and costs $15 for a 5.6-ounce bag, which contains 24 servings — equivalent to 24 eggs — and is also available for purchase on its website. The company also has a similar product to replace eggs in baking.

Yo Egg is a newer company that has recently expanded the number of grocery stores and restaurants that sell its products, which include a plant-based poached egg, a patty, and a hard-boiled egg substitute. I recently tried the poached product — made with soy and chickpea protein — at a restaurant and liked it. The flavor was good, but I was even more impressed with the company’s technical ability to create an egg white pouch filled with a thick, yolky liquid.

I never liked hard-boiled or deviled eggs, so WunderEggs — launched in 2023 by Texas-based startup Crafty Counter — aren’t for me, but I have friends who like them. WunderEggs’s main ingredients are simple — water, almonds, coconut milk, and cashews — and they look remarkably similar to eggs.

Last year, the company won an innovation award from grocery giant Albertsons, and it’s now available in 1,600 of its stores (Albertsons, Safeway, Shaw’s, and Vons), as well as all Whole Foods locations.

A tray of six costs around $8 and contains 8 grams of protein.

Tofu is the perfect food: it’s cheap, high in protein, iron, and calcium, available just about everywhere, and can be used in a variety of dishes and cuisines, including as a substitute for an egg scramble. On its own, it doesn’t taste like eggs, but medium-firm tofu, when mashed and sauteed, can have a similar texture. Like chicken meat, tofu doesn’t have an inherently strong flavor and can absorb whatever spices and sauces you throw at it.

Tofu scramble — a classic plant-based staple — is typically made with oil, garlic, onions, vegetables, and (plant-based) cheese. It’s filling, affordable, healthy, and if made well, tasty in its own right even if it doesn’t directly replicate the flavor of eggs. A pinch of kala namak, or black salt, will give it an eggy taste and smell.

Here are a few popular, fool-proof recipes to get started:

A decent tofu scramble should take you 30 minutes or less to make, but if you want it even faster, try the all-day egg scramble from tofu maker Hodo. It’s a spiced and mashed block of tofu rich with flavor, made with onion powder, garlic, cumin, turmeric, smoked paprika, and more. It’s a bit salty, but cooking it with a few vegetables and cheese can cut some of that.

I’m more of a baker than a cook, and I’ve been vegan for almost 20 years, so I’ve mastered the art of baking without eggs, and I can tell you it’s quite simple — because a lot of baked good staples don’t need eggs in the first place. I can’t tell you how many times a non-vegan bit into something that I or a friend made, had no idea it didn’t have eggs (or dairy), and were none the wiser.

You can use products like Just Egg, AcreMade’s egg replacer, or this one from Bob’s Red Mill, to replace eggs in baking. But to save money, you can simply use, depending on what you’re making, bananas, ground flax seeds with water, apple sauce, silken tofu, or even the water from a can of chickpeas (called aquafaba). Those ingredients may strike you as odd egg replacers, but eggs don’t add too much to the flavor of a baked good. Rather, they’re more of a functional ingredient, working to bind other ingredients together, improve texture, and give certain desserts some fluff. Depending on the recipe, these other ingredients can do the trick.

This guide from popular vegan recipe developer Nisha Vora covers how to use these ingredients as egg replacers and which are best for which baked goods. To be safe, I recommend using recipes that are already egg-free so you know it’s been tested as such, rather than trying to reformulate a classic recipe, especially when you’re just getting started.

Aside from what I’ve mentioned here, there are a few other plant-based egg products that either aren’t easy to find at grocery stores or aren’t available at all in the US: Beleaf plant-based egg, Crack’d, Neggst, and Zero Egg. (I’ve had the Beleaf egg and enjoyed it but haven’t seen it in stores.)

If the US were facing shortages of chicken, beef, or cow’s milk, consumers would have a wide array of alternative choices. But for some reason, despite the enduring popularity of the egg, the plant-based food sector has put little effort into making tasty and affordable animal-free options.

That’s a shame, because egg farming is particularly cruel to animals. Most egg-laying hens are packed into tiny cages, unable to even flap their wings, where they languish for one-and-a-half to two years before they’re slaughtered for pet food. Cage-free farming is an improvement, but still much more inhumane than you might think.

I asked Tetrick of Eat Just why there’s such a lack of competition (Just Egg, he said, makes up 99 percent of the plant-based egg market). He told me it’s a highly technical challenge compared to making, say, a plant-based burger, and it’s required the company to raise a lot of capital, and take on a lot of risk.

“We almost didn’t accomplish it,” he added.

I’m glad they did, because it means we have at least one great plant-based egg product that’s also widely available. But for the sake of the hens, and food security threats like the bird flu, I hope they get a lot more competitors.