Americans have never had this many options in the beef aisle. That's certainly what the growing number of offerings lining supermarket shelves would seem to suggest. And yet, behind the carefully branded facade of new packaged meats is a rather different and troubling reality: the mere illusion of choice.
Americans, as it turns out, have actually never had so few options in deciding what company makes their meat. "The US meat industry is more consolidated today than it's ever been before," Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business, said in an interview.
Indeed, the top four US beef packers—Tyson Foods, JBS USA, Cargill, and National Beef—control some 75% of the US beef market, according to Tyson (pdf p. 11), the nation's largest packager. Leonard, for his part, puts the number closer to 80%. 50 years ago, that number, formally referred to as the four-firm concentration, was nearer to 25%, per estimates by the Census Bureau (pdf p. 8).
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