What happened
The Justice Department's Antitrust Division said Thursday it filed a proposed settlement in Minnesota federal court to resolve claims that Agri Stats Inc. unlawfully shared price, output and cost information among competing meat processors.
The proposed deal, if approved, would require Agri Stats to stop providing sales reports or nonpublic pricing information that the department says chicken, pork and turkey processors used to identify opportunities to raise prices. It would also stop the company from reporting production, cost and labor data at the company or facility level.
The department said Agri Stats is a data-sharing and consulting company that currently operates in the broiler chicken market and historically operated in pork and turkey markets. According to the agency, Agri Stats collected data from meat processors' accounting systems, standardized it and redistributed it in granular reports and meetings, while meat buyers such as restaurants, grocery stores and food distributors did not receive the same information.
The DOJ framed the case as an attack on one-sided information exchange in concentrated food markets, saying the alleged conduct reduced competition, enabled systematic price increases and allowed coordinated decisions about how much meat to produce. The proposed decree would require Agri Stats to make most information it distributes available to interested domestic purchasers on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms.
The settlement would also require Agri Stats to follow restrictions on how timely its shared information may be, report to a court-approved monitor selected by the DOJ and establish an antitrust compliance program covering data security, whistleblower protections and mandatory reporting of potential future antitrust violations.
Agri Stats subsidiary Express Markets Inc. would be allowed to continue providing its price reports substantially as before. The DOJ said those reports were not the focus of the case because they are less detailed and available to all interested parties, not only meat processors.
The settlement is not final. Under the Tunney Act, the proposed settlement and a competitive impact statement must be published in the Federal Register, followed by a 60-day public comment period, before the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota may enter final judgment upon finding the deal is in the public interest.