Pilgrim’s Pride to Pay $100 Million in Protein Industry’s Largest Antitrust Settlement Ever

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Pilgrim’s Pride will pay $100 million to settle a lawsuit that alleges it conspired to underpay farmworkers, the largest settlement in the protein industry’s history, according to a court document filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma.

According to the settlement, the poultry processor, a subsidiary of JBS, was accused by a group of farm workers of “a vast conspiracy to conceal compensation payments to broiler farmers nationwide” in collaboration with competing companies.

The company did not admit to any wrongdoing.

“The farmers were deprived of strong competition in the scope of broiler chicken breeding services, which resulted in artificially low wages for all farmers for each pound of broiler chickens produced,” the court stated in the justification of the settlement.

In the document, the court acknowledged that the settlement came after more than seven years of “hard process” during which more than 1.7 million court documents were reviewed.

Several other poultry companies had previously reached settlements in the same case: Tyson Foods, for $21 million; Sanderson Farms, for $17.75 million; Koch Foods, for $15.5 million; and Perdue Farms, for $14.75 million. The settlement amount from all alleged companies totaled $169 million.

Pilgrim’s Pride had not responded to a request for comment by the time this article went to press.

Price-fixing and related antitrust cases have rocked the meat industry in recent years, leading to hefty settlements from major producers. In April 2023, Pilgrim’s Pride and rival Perdue, among other companies, paid $35 million to settle a class-action lawsuit accused of a price-fixing conspiracy in Washington state.

But producers have won in some cases. Last fall, an Illinois court ruled that Sanderson Farms did not participate in an industry-wide scheme to gouge chicken prices.