Agri Stats Lawsuit: DOJ Settlement Terms and Class Actions

The Agri Stats lawsuit is a civil antitrust case the U.S. Department of Justice and six state attorneys general filed in 2023 against a Fort Wayne, Indiana data company that collected pricing, production, and cost information from competing chicken, pork, and turkey processors and sold it back to them in detailed reports. A proposed settlement announced on May 7, 2026 requires Agri Stats to stop selling its competitor-level sales reports, open any remaining reports to buyers on both sides of the market, and operate under a court-appointed compliance monitor. The agreement carries no federal fine but reshapes how the company can do business for up to ten years.

What the Government Said Agri Stats Was Doing

Agri Stats, founded in 1985, pulled data directly from subscribers’ internal accounting systems, standardized it, and returned hundreds of pages of reports covering transaction-level prices, production volumes, processing costs, worker wages, profit margins, and freezer inventories. Reports named individual companies and plants and ranked processors against one another. Some executives used those rankings to set bonuses.¹

Two features of the business drew the government’s attention. First, a “give-to-get” rule: a processor had to hand over its own data to see anyone else’s. Second, the reports were sold only to processors. Grocery stores, restaurants, distributors, farmers, and workers could not buy them.²

The DOJ’s complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, alleged that this arrangement violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by giving processors “near-total visibility” into one another’s operations.³ Minnesota, California, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah joined as co-plaintiffs, with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison leading the state coalition.⁴ The government said processors used the reports to “chase price,” identifying products where they charged less than competitors and raising prices to match, and it alleged that processors were nearly twice as likely to raise prices on underpriced products as they were to cut prices on overpriced ones.⁵ The complaint quoted a Smithfield Foods executive summarizing the advice Agri Stats’ consultants gave: “Just raise your price.”⁶

Nearly every major U.S. meat processor was named as a subscriber and alleged co-conspirator, including Tyson, Perdue, Pilgrim’s Pride, Sanderson Farms, Smithfield, JBS, Hormel, Butterball, and Cargill. In broiler chicken, subscribers represented 95 percent of all chicken processed in the country during the period from 2007 to 2021.⁷

Evidence That Prices Moved

The plaintiffs’ economic expert, Professor Marc Rysman, ran regression analyses tied to periods when Agri Stats paused certain reports during earlier private litigation. He found pork prices fell by up to 14.7 percent and turkey prices by up to 13.6 percent when processors stopped participating in the exchange. In a separate analysis of bacon, prices rose by more than 20 percent after Agri Stats began reporting on the product and dropped roughly 8.6 percent after the program ended.⁵

On February 24, 2026, U.S. District Judge John Tunheim denied Agri Stats’ motion for summary judgment, holding that “numerous fact issues remain” about whether the company’s contracts created a “substantial anticompetitive effect that harmed consumers.” The court also refused to exclude the expert testimony from either side.⁸ The proposed settlement followed within months.

What the Proposed Settlement Requires

The consent decree carries no federal fine. It does include monetary compensation for the state coalition, though the amount was not disclosed publicly.⁴ The heart of the deal is a set of operational restrictions.

Agri Stats must stop offering its “Sales Report Books” and can no longer report or receive non-public sales and pricing data used to spot opportunities for price increases. It cannot publish production, cost, or labor figures at the company or plant level. It cannot rank processors or identify who contributed any given piece of data.⁹

For any reporting the company continues, three rules apply:

Open access. Most information must be available for purchase by anyone in the United States on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, and non-processor buyers cannot be charged more than the average price paid by single-plant processors.⁹
Data aging. Shared information must be at least 45 days old on a cumulative average, and production-decision data such as breeder chick placements must be at least 90 days old.¹
Anonymity thresholds. Any reported statistic must draw from at least three processors, and no single processor can account for more than 70 percent of the underlying data.⁹

Agri Stats must run an antitrust compliance program with data security protocols, whistleblower protections, and mandatory reporting of potential violations. A compliance monitor chosen by the DOJ will oversee the company at Agri Stats’ expense. Within 30 days of judgment entry, the company must give the government its modified reports, customer lists, and contracts.⁹

Agri Stats’ subsidiary Express Markets, Inc. is allowed to keep operating substantially as it has. Its price reports are less detailed, are drawn independently from invoice transactions, and are already sold to buyers on all sides of the market.¹⁰²

Where the Case Stands

The proposed final judgment was published in the Federal Register on June 5, 2026, opening a 60-day public comment period under the Tunney Act. Comments were due by August 4, 2026. After that window closes, the district court may enter final judgment. As of mid-2026, the court had not yet done so. If approved, the decree will stay in force for up to ten years, and the compliance monitor will serve for seven.¹

Private Class Actions Against Agri Stats

Consumers and direct meat purchasers pursued Agri Stats separately in three consolidated class actions: In re Broiler Chicken Antitrust Litigation in the Northern District of Illinois, In re Pork Antitrust Litigation in the District of Minnesota, and In re Turkey Antitrust Litigation in the Northern District of Illinois. On March 13, 2026, plaintiffs’ firm Hagens Berman announced settlements with Agri Stats in all three cases. None involves a cash payment from the company. Each turns on conduct reforms similar to those in the DOJ decree, including removing participant names from reports, ending competitor-level price and production data, retaining an antitrust compliance attorney for five years, and running annual employee training. The agreements contain no admission of wrongdoing.¹¹¹²

A court granted preliminary approval of the turkey settlement on April 16, 2026, and a final approval hearing in the broiler case was scheduled for September 1, 2026. The broiler agreement was reached after Agri Stats had already won summary judgment at the trial court and while the plaintiffs’ appeal was pending before the Seventh Circuit.¹²¹³

The processor defendants in those same cases have paid substantial sums. Pork settlements with Smithfield, Tyson, JBS, and others total roughly $208 million. Turkey settlements with Cargill, Tyson, Cooper Farms, and Farbest Foods total about $40.5 million, with a trial against remaining defendants scheduled for October 2026. Across all three protein cases, recoveries for class members exceed $450 million.¹⁴¹³

Why the Case Matters Beyond Meat

In February 2023, the DOJ and FTC withdrew 30-year-old “Safe Harbor Guidelines” that had told companies benchmarking was generally safe if a third party managed the data, the information was more than three months old, and the results were sufficiently aggregated. The agencies called the old guidelines outdated and overly permissive, noting that modern data tools can let competitors reverse-engineer supposedly anonymized figures.²

The DOJ has called the Agri Stats decree its “most detailed articulation to date of the boundaries between permissible benchmarking and unlawful information sharing.” The numbers baked into the settlement, including the 45-day aging rule, the three-contributor minimum, the 70 percent cap on any single contributor, and the open-access pricing requirement, now function as a practical benchmark for what the government considers acceptable.²

The DOJ has explicitly tied the case to its lawsuit against RealPage, the software company accused of facilitating coordinated pricing among competing landlords. Both cases target what the government calls a “hub-and-spoke” arrangement, in which an intermediary collects sensitive data from competitors and redistributes it so they can align without talking directly. The RealPage settlement in November 2025 likewise banned real-time competitor data and limited the granularity of what could be shared.² For any company that runs a benchmarking service or a pricing algorithm using data from competitors, those two decrees now set the terms of the conversation.

1
Federal Register. United States et al. v. Agri Stats, Inc., Proposed Final Judgment and Competitive Impact Statement
2
U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Department Requires Agri Stats to End Exchange of Competitively Sensitive Information
3
U.S. Department of Justice. Agri Stats Complaint
4
Minnesota Attorney General. Agri Stats Settlement Announcement
5
U.S. Department of Justice. Agri Stats Memorandum Opinion and Order
6
U.S. Department of Justice. Second Amended Complaint, United States v. Agri Stats
7
Wolters Kluwer. US v. Agri Stats Inc.
8
MLex. Agri Stats Motion for Summary Judgment in US DOJ Information Sharing Suit Denied
9
U.S. Department of Justice. Proposed Final Judgment, United States v. Agri Stats
10
Express Markets, Inc. Reports and Services
11
Hagens Berman. Settlements Reached With Agri Stats in Broilers, Turkey, Pork Antitrust Suits Over Price Fixing Allegations
12
Overcharged for Chicken. Broiler Chicken Antitrust Settlement FAQ
13
Hagens Berman. Turkey Antitrust Litigation
14
Hagens Berman. Pork Antitrust Litigation