A little-known company called Agri Stats finds itself in some significant legal issues, claiming its actions are likely impacting your grocery bills. The company currently faces an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice and just settled a class-action suit.
Agri Stats is a data company that collects detailed financial, operation and other information from meat processors around the country. Those processors can subscribe to Agri Stats to track industry data, including on competitors.
DOJ lawsuit
That’s where the Justice Department comes in. In September 2023, prosecutors filed a lawsuit alleging Agri Stats organized and helped manage detailed information exchanges between major meat processors.
The exchanges allegedly helped processors in the chicken, pork and turkey industries to coordinate pricing and suppress competition.
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“The Justice Department is committed to addressing anticompetitive information exchanges that result in consumers paying more for chicken, pork and turkey,” Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said when the suit was filed in 2023. “This case is the latest effort by the Justice Department to protect American consumers, farmers and workers from anticompetitive practices in the agriculture industry.”
In other words, Agri Stats allegedly helped companies that control most of the meat supply in America fix prices and wages.
“Each of the producers who use Agri Stats gave very detailed information to Agri Stats of all of their production and weekly figures about production and sales,” Eleanor Fox, professor emeritus of New York University School of Law, told Straight Arrow News. “And with that kind of information, the companies could see what one another is doing and do it in lockstep.”
The argument is that it hurts consumers, farmers, workers and more.
“That resulted in higher prices to consumers, lower prices to farmers and other producers, and lower wages to workers,” Peter Carstensen, professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin Law School, told SAN.
Agri Stats did not respond when SAN reached out for comment.
However, they quickly posted a response in 2023 to the lawsuit being filed.
“The lawsuit threatens serious harm to American consumers of chicken, pork, and turkey because protein producers depend upon Agri Stats’ reports to help them identify opportunities to reduce production costs to keep prices low,” the company wrote on its website.
Agri Stats attempted to get the lawsuit dismissed in 2024 but was denied.
As of December 2025, the Justice Department was pushing for a May trial for this case, but no official date has been set.
“This started under the Biden administration, but it has been pursued with some vigor by the Trump administration,” Carstensen said. “And the problem is, going forward, if you don’t get fairly tight control over the kinds of information that Agri Stats will collect and share and the way it will share that information, the problem is going to just recur.”
There’s also a chance it never makes it to trial.
“It would surprise me if there have been no settlement discussions,” Carstensen said.
Class-action suits
“Once the government brings a big antitrust price fixing case, usually you will see class actions, and in this particular case, we saw a lot of class actions,” Fox said.
That includes a recent settlement on a class-action suit over Agri Stats allegedly conspiring with red meat processors to suppress workers’ wages across the country.
“If they were competing for the workers, they’d have to raise wages, but when they have an agreement to not compete for the workers, they would squeeze the workers,” Fox said.
The case was brought by tens-of-thousands of red meat processing workers at 140 different plants, and they received more than $200 million in settlements.
“For Agri Stats, in this latest settlement, it really got away with nothing,” Fox said. “It did not put any money into the pot. It already had discontinued its servicing on the data for red meat producers, and it simply promised that if it went back into that line, it would change its methodologies so it wasn’t using such detailed information and wasn’t using the personal confidential information of each company and then giving out the results to all of the competitors.”
Last year, Agri Stats also settled a class-action suit from poultry workers over similar allegations. Those workers received $400 million in settlements from other defendants in the case like Tyson Foods and Perdue Farms.
“You begin to get settlements once it is once it becomes fairly clear that your chance of prevailing in court is limited,” Carstensen said.
Tyson Foods has also settled a class-action suit with pork workers, but Agri Stats remains a defendant in that case.
Some companies have also reached settlements with turkey workers.
Impact on you
Grocery prices have been on the rise for years, and there are several factors as to why that’s happening. But experts SAN spoke with believe the collusion between producers allegedly facilitated by Agri Stats is one of them.
“It is outrageously known that the price of food is too high, and one of the causes is private companies getting together to fix prices,” Fox said.
“Prices are up for a lot of reasons, but I do think prices are up in part because of price fixing conspiracies,” she added. “And some of those price fixing conspiracies are tried to be disguised as simply exchanging information.”
Carstensen said the companies being able to see each other’s prices has contributed to consumers paying more.
“They have not been lowering the prices to consumers because they can coordinate their pricing,” he said. “And one of the things Agri Stats was doing was advising companies, your particular product is at the low-price range of those products so you may want to raise your price so that it’ll be closer to what your competitors are doing. Or if your price is high, hey, you’re at the high end. Stay there.”
Fox also said artificial intelligence is now playing a role in these kinds of schemes.
“AI makes it easier to price fix,” she said. “It can do a lot of good. It can help assemble data in a very important way, but it also can help companies fix prices.”
