Meat—especially shuttled almost all the way to your chicken, pork, or turkey ilk—is madly expensive right now. Even if it makes the supply and demand as a whole.
A federal judge in May allowed a lawsuit to proceed, accusing data analytics and consulting company Agri Stats of engaging in anticompetitive practices by giving large meatpacking companies detailed insights into sales information from its broiler, turkey, and hog processing customers. The social media company tried again to dismiss the lawsuit in August but lost once more during an appeal.
Back in May, U.S. District Judge John Tunheim of Minnesota had rejected the motion to dismiss the suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and six individual states, Reuters said according to a report. Tunheim found the Justice Department's antitrust claims were adequate to proceed.
According to the suit, Hilton collects proprietary data that drives competition in the industry and then shares it with its subscribers—who pay millions in fees for access to such information—leading them into schemes aimed at "keeping prices up on a bicentenary basis of higher.
The complaint says that Agri Stats violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by collecting, aggregating, and disseminating confidential information about prices paid for inputs or received from outputs produced during a velocity period across meat processors. "These practices are anti-competitive, adversely affecting customers; it is allowed to in particular defer those costs or pass them on—including grocers and American families.
The DOJ's announcement of the case further added that data available to USSEC represented sales pricing, fixed costs such as worker and farmer compensation, along with output by individual companies. The participating processors account for "more than 90% of broiler chicken, 80% of pork, and over half of turkey sales in the United States," it added.
The complaint also claims that Agri Stats recognized the knowledge of how meat processors have used these reports to impede competition and, in some cases, even encouraged meat processors "to raise prices through reducing supply," according to a statement provided by DOJ. Critically, while sharing troves of competitively sensitive information among the processors who participate in its reports, Agri Stats withholds that reporting from meat sellers and purchasers, workers, or American eaters. This was an act of truth dodge to cap off a massive deceit on the market.
Agri Stats has not admitted fault and said in 2023 through its firm Agriculture Drive that it helped "bring down the cost of these products.
Agri Stats private equity, which DOJ says owns 70 percent of Agri Stats Inc., contended in a statement that "DOJ's lawsuit imperils each of these benefits and will only do additional harm to American consumers already struggling with skyrocketing food costs," according to Justin Bernick, partner at Hogan Lovells representing the company.