Two grocers last week filed a price-fixing lawsuit against the country’s top poultry processors. The lawsuit alleges that the processors, including Tyson Foods, Koch Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Perdue Farms, have conspired to fix the price of broiler chickens over the course of several decades. The grocers, Winn-Dixie Stores and Bi-Lo Holdings, claim that they paid inflated prices for chickens as a result of the price-fixing scheme, and seek damages accordingly. A representative from Tyson called the lawsuit’s claims “unfounded.”
The suit alleges that the biggest poultry processors have boosted and fixed prices by sharing information with one another through a secretive information-sharing service called Agri-Stats. The lawsuit also alleges that the companies controlled supply by slaughtering broiler chickens or destroying eggs.
This isn’t the first time that others in the poultry supply chain have challenged the dominance of the top processors. Several antitrust lawsuits have claimed anticompetitive damage as a result of the processors’ behaviors, including one brought by a food distributor in 2016 and another brought by a group of chicken farmers in 2017.
The top poultry processors control around 90 percent of the broiler chickens produced and processed in the United States.