There’s a case of court dйjа vu going on when it comes to class action lawsuits against beef packers.
On Friday, April 26, a federal class action lawsuit was issued against the top four beef packers in the U.S. on allegations of price-fixing schemes that artificially inflated beef prices paid by consumers. This suit was announced just three days after the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF) announced their own class action suit against packers on very similar allegations.
“Our complaint alleges that families nationwide have been overpaying for years for beef products they buy routinely, unknowingly paying inflated prices fixed by a scheme to limit beef supplies,” said Steve Berman, managing partner of Hagens Berman in the law firm’s announcement of the suit.
“The result: This $100 billion industry reaped billions of dollars in extra profits while consumers paid far more for beef than they should have. We intend to put an end to it.”
The suit names JBS USA Food Company Holdings, Tyson Foods Inc., Cargill, Inc. and National Beef Packing Company as the packing defendants, along with Agri Stats, an ag-focused statistical analysis firm.
“These defendants entered into a conspiracy to maximize profits from the distribution channel of beef—by both extracting all gains from the ranchers who raised the cattle, as well as artificially inflating the price of beef being sold to the consumer,” read the complaint document.
“The result of the scheme was that the defendants underpaid the farmers by artificially depressing demand for cattle and thus lowering [prices], and simultaneously overcharged consumers by reducing their output of beef and thus inflating consumer prices.”
The complaint document and announcement cite a beef “industry insider” as saying “meat works like the mafia.” The complaint document additionally claims “the Meatpacking Defendants frequently sell meat to each other which is then processed for retail sale. The result is that “someone may be a competitor but also a customer.”
The class action seeks to recover losses for consumers and injunctive relief from the court “to put an end to the anticompetitive behavior.”
The case names two consumers—Kenneth Peterson of Nevada and Richard Kimble of Wisconsin—as plaintiffs, though the law firm solicits anyone who purchased beef since 2015 to possibly join the class action suit. The suit demands a jury trial and was filed in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota. The firm also notes that it has an ongoing suit of a similar nature against pork and poultry processors, originally filed in 2018.
The Hagens Bergman suit on behalf of consumers has numerous similarities to the R-CALF suit brought on behalf of cattle producers. The “Class Period” of interest in both suits start at the beginning of 2015, the packer defendants are the same, and most of the allegations overlap in theme if not in actual descriptions. In several places, the same individual sources are cited as evidence for the claims.
WLJ reached out to R-CALF regarding the similarities of the new suit to theirs. CEO Bill Bullard said they were unrelated and had been unaware of it.
“It was a surprise to me,” he said. — Kerry Halladay, WLJ editor
