WASHINGTON (LN) — The Justice Department and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, acting alongside other states, reached a settlement Thursday with agricultural data broker Agri Stats, Inc., resolving allegations that the company facilitated price coordination among meat processors by circulating cost and pricing data that allowed competitors to monitor one another's operations.
The settlement, announced May 8, requires Agri Stats to make what the parties described as industry-shifting changes to both the type of information it can distribute and how it distributes it. The company will also make monetary payments to the participating states, though the announcement did not disclose the total amount.
Agri Stats, according to the release, collected and shared competitively sensitive cost and operational data among chicken, pork, and turkey processors. That flow of information, the government alleged, allowed rival companies to closely track each other's pricing strategies, reducing competitive pressure and enabling coordinated price increases that raised grocery bills for American consumers.
"Agri Stats facilitated the sharing of information that killed true competition in pricing and raised the price of food for consumers," Paxton said in a statement. "The company will now be held accountable for its antitrust violation, and American consumers will now have lower-priced groceries."
The parties have framed the settlement as a marker for how competing companies may lawfully share competitively sensitive information going forward — a signal to the broader industry about the limits of benchmarking arrangements under federal antitrust law.
Paxton's office described the resolution as one of the most significant enforcement actions taken against an industry with, in the release's words, a history of antitrust violations.
The Texas AG's office noted that Paxton has pursued parallel antitrust matters in the agriculture sector, including a separate lawsuit against pesticide manufacturers and a recently concluded settlement against egg producer Cal-Maine over price-gouging allegations.
The specific dollar amount of the states' monetary recovery, the identities of all participating states, and the precise operational restrictions imposed on Agri Stats were not disclosed in the announcement.