A ban on battery caged hens has left some supermarket shelves empty and prompted cartons to be rationed. The Egg Producers Federation has said more than 75 percent of chicken farmers have had to change their farming methods or their career because of the ban.
Sugrue said the cost of butter had doubled in the last 12 months. At his Timaru bakery, they had stopped making biscuits as they were no longer economical.
"The biggest issue that the craft bakers have is a rise in all ingredients. It's not just one specific ingredient ... flour has skyrocketed, butter, sugar, we've got eggs … then of course, if we wanted to distribute that ... the freight is very expensive now."
Despite the challenges, bakers who made good business choices would continue to be successful, he believed.
"Bakers have to really work smarter, not harder, and really realise what is the best margin product that we're making and concentrate on that, and you know, ditch the ones that there's really not a lot of margin in."
Nada Bakery manager Michael Gray said eggs were a commodity product and the shortage had exacerbated already high prices.
"We've already seen eggs increase significantly over this year - we had an increase in August of about 27 percent, we had another increase of about 13 percent I think at the end of November, and we're already seeing another increase due to the shortage."
Cowell's Genuine Pavlovas has been making and supplying supermarkets with pavlovas for decades.
Owner Matthew Heaton said without egg whites, there was no way of making a classic pavlova, so the rising cost of the ingredient was a concern.
"There's only so much you can absorb before you have to pass it on [to the customer] ... if you keep putting the price up, all of a sudden demand can drop down.
"So you [have] got to be reasonable and [charge] what you can charge, but you've also got to go to make a dollar at the end of the day."
"If things change too much, we might have to look at different options."
Meanwhile, many supermarket shelves are bare of eggs while others are limiting the number of cartons customers can buy.
At a Pak'nSave in Christchurch, customers were only allowed two cartons each.
The ban on battery-caged hens, announced back in 2012, came into effect on Saturday.
Foodstuffs spokeswoman Emma Wooster said the ban on cage eggs was a "significant change for the egg supply industry".
In South Island Foodstuffs stores, which include New World, Pak’nSave and Four Square, a temporary limit had been placed on eggs to help support the transition, she said.
Foodstuffs would continue to work closely with the Government and egg suppliers to meet its cage-free target by 2027.
-Additional reporting Wyatt Ryder, ODT
