McDonald’s Sues Top Meat Packers for Allegedly Colluding to Inflate the Price of Beef
October 30, 2024 | 1 min to read
McDonald’s has filed a lawsuit against the top four meat packers—Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef Packing Company—alleging a scheme of price fixing in the beef industry. The complaint accuses these companies of engaging in anticompetitive practices that limit supply to inflate prices, creating a monopoly that harms direct purchasers like McDonald’s. The lawsuit emphasizes that this conduct contravenes antitrust laws intended to protect buyers from such practices.
NEW YORK (AP) — McDonald’s has some beef with today’s largest meat packers.
The fast food giant is suing the U.S. meat industry’s “Big Four” — Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef Packing Company — and their subsidiaries, alleging a price fixing scheme for beef specifically. In a federal complaint, filed in New York, McDonald’s accused the companies of anticompetitive measures such as collectively limiting supply to boost prices and charge “illegally inflated” amounts.
This collusion caused the beef market to become “a monopoly in which direct purchasers were forced to buy at prices dictated by (the meat packers),” McDonald’s suit reads — later noting that the injury it has sustained as one of those buyers is what “antitrust laws were designed to prevent.”
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