For John Young, the fourth generation to work at Young’s Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Easter means lots and lots of eggs. In years past, on the week leading up to the holiday, the team at this family-owned farm and amusement park buys 10,000 of them for their annual Easter egg hunt. They are then baked in standing ovens — “It’s much quicker than boiling that many” — and cooled before being hand-dyed by the dozens in big steel bowls.
In February, though, Mr. Young and his family began mulling the event, which is usually attended by more than 2,000 people. The state of the egg market in the United States made them wonder if the hunt still made sense.
This year will look different. For the first time in the 40-year history of the hunt, the eggs laid on the green grass of the farm will be made of plastic, filled with a coupon for a free ride on their carousel.
“The responses have been pretty positive,” Mr. Young said of the social-media posts the company has put out to let customers know about the change. “I think people were quietly scared we’d cancel the event because of egg prices currently. So they’re glad we’re still doing it.”
Chicken eggs, the stars of Easter baskets and Easter egg hunts and rolls across the country, are going to cost more than in years past. Even as egg prices are dropping nationwide the anxiety about the cost persists, and many consumers are getting creative at finding substitutes. Videos on how to dye marshmallows, potatoes and even onions have begun to circulate on social media and news websites.
The food blogger Lexi Harrison, who has run Crowded Kitchen with her mother since 2017, was inspired by peanut butter and chocolate eggs sold at grocery stores this time of year. She developed and shared “a healthier copycat recipe.” She mixes peanut butter, almond flour and maple syrup, and shapes the resulting mixture into eggs that she then dips in melted white chocolate tinted with blue spirulina powder and matcha.
Her video showing the process and the finished product, a pastel blue egg speckled with cocoa powder, has more than 64 million views and 33,000 comments between Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
“I didn’t expect the reaction we got,” Ms. Harrison said. “The comments fell into two camps: people saying thank you and that eggs are really expensive right now, and people saying eggs aren’t that expensive so I should just dye some anyway.”
For many, dyeing eggs for Easter is nonnegotiable and a small cost to incur to continue a tradition. “It’s still relatively affordable,” said Joe Ens, the chief executive of Signature Brands, the parent company of PAAS, an egg dye company which sells more than 10 million Easter-themed kits each year. A survey of 9,000 PAAS consumers found 90 percent of consumers who celebrate Easter and typically dye eggs planned on doing so despite costs and 54 percent plan to never stop.
Mr. Ens compares the dedication to dyeing eggs each year to the tradition of buying a Christmas tree; the act of decorating can span generations.
“The experience reminds people of the joyful experiences they had in their own childhoods and people want to keep that alive,” he said, adding that the company has already sold 20 percent more egg dyeing kits than at this time last year.
For Ms. Harrison, who has “never really been a fan of boiled eggs,” alternatives are important because of the scarcity of eggs in her area of Michigan, she said. “More than half the time I’ve been to the store in the last month there’s been no eggs.”
Mr. Young said similar observations spurred the adjustment to Young’s Jersey Dairy’s annual event. “It wasn’t the cost as much as it was the fear of wiping out local inventories,” he said. The money the farm typically spends buying eggs, about $3,000, will instead be donated to two local food banks.
But the experience of hunting for eggs on the farm will be the same.
“Plastic eggs can be just as fun,” Mr. Young said. “But I’m hoping we can get back to the tradition next year.”
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