A federal grand jury indicted four poultry industry executives on a charge of conspiring to fix prices and rig bids for broiler chickens, announced the Justice Department on Wednesday. The charges were the first in “an ongoing federal antitrust investigation into price fixing, bid rigging, and other anti-competitive conduct in the broiler chicken industry,” it said.
The one-count indictment accuses the men, from two major producers of broiler chickens, with conspiring to fix prices and rig bids across the United States from at least as early as 2012 and continuing into at least early 2017. Broiler chickens are raised for human consumption and are sold to restaurants and supermarkets.
Charged were Jayson Penn, chief executive of Pilgrim’s Pride; Roger Austin, a former vice president of Pilgrim’s Pride; Mikell Fries, president of Claxton Poultry Farms; and Scott Brady, a Claxton vice president. Pilgrim’s, headquartered in Greeley, Colorado, says it is the source of “nearly one of every five chickens in the United States.” Claxton Poultry, based in Claxton, Georgia, says it sells 300 million pounds of chicken meat yearly.
Court documents say the four men, “together with co-conspirators known and unknown to the Grand Jury, entered into and engaged in a continuing combination and conspiracy to suppress and eliminate competition by rigging bids and fixing prices and other price-related terms for broiler chicken products sold in the United States,” reported Meat and Poultry, a news site.
“Executives who cheat American consumers, restaurateurs, and grocers, and compromise the integrity of our food supply, will be held responsible for their actions,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
The offense in the indictment, returned by a grand jury in Denver, carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Two large food distributors, Sysco and U.S. Foods, filed separate lawsuits in early 2018 alleging that chicken processors, including Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Koch Meat Co., Sanderson Farms, and Perdue Foods, colluded to raise chicken prices. FERN reported last June that the government had intervened in those lawsuits, in a signal that it was investigating sales practices, too.