Bob Evans Farms, operating a chain of restaurants, has filed a lawsuit claiming that 19 chicken integrators representing the largest U.S. companies engaged in an illegal conspiracy from 2008 to 2017 to curtail the supply of chickens in order to manipulate wholesale prices of chicken products.
Existing civil lawsuits alleging collusion filed in 2019 were suspended before depositions were taken at the request of the Department of Justice. Subsequent investigations by anti-trust lawyers at the DOJ led to criminal indictments of two executives each at Pilgrim’s Pride, controlled by JBS S.A. and Claxton Farms on numerous charges centering on collusion between their companies. It is considered significant that indictments were restricted to these two integrators and that no other companies were involved, despite presumed intensive scrutiny of voluminous records of transactions discovered in the civil cases.