Butterball has reached a $34m settlement agreement over claims that the US poultry company participated in a conspiracy to drive up turkey prices.
Plaintiffs filed a motion for preliminary approval of the deal on 21 August with the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
The agreement makes Butterball the last remaining direct-purchaser defendant in the antitrust litigation. If approved, it will resolve the long-running case ahead of the jury trial scheduled for October.
Court documents reported by Bloomberg Law indicate that the settlement would raise total recoveries from all settling defendants to approximately $130.7m.
Just Food has contacted Butterball for comment.
The other defendants include Cargill, which agreed to pay $32.5m. Prestage Foods and House of Raeford Farms accepted settlements worth $15m and $3.7m, respectively.
Food distributors and wholesalers filed a class action against the companies in December 2019, alleging that turkey suppliers used information provided by Agri Stats to coordinate production cuts and maintain artificially high prices.
The data reportedly covered areas including sales, production volumes and capacity.
“As a result of defendants’ unlawful conduct, plaintiffs and the class paid artificially inflated prices for turkey during the class period. Such prices exceeded the amount they would have paid if the price for turkey had been determined by a competitive market,” the plaintiffs alleged.
In October 2020, US district judge Virginia Kendall declined defendants’ efforts to have the antitrust case dismissed.
