On October 26th, Northern District of Illinois Judge Virginia M. Kendall denied three motions to dismiss a putative class action alleging that the nation’s leading turkey suppliers—including Butterball, Cargill, House of Raeford, Tyson, and Perdue—engaged in a conspiracy to fix the prices of turkey sold in the United States over a seven year period. [1]
Like several other pending criminal and civil antitrust actions involving the meat industry, the class complaint alleges that suppliers constituting 95 percent of the turkey market engaged in information exchanges of confidential business information, including production and sales data. According to the complaint, the turkey suppliers used Agri Stats—a data compilation company that services the agricultural industry and markets itself as designed to help protein suppliers improve their profitability—as a mechanism for accessing current and future sensitive business information. Judge Kendall ruled that allegations that Defendants knew their competitors participated in Agri Stats and had the ability to decode the supposedly anonymized metrics were sufficient to allege a hub-and-spoke conspiracy—with the Defendants being the spokes and Agri Stats being the hub.
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