A group of consumers filed a lawsuit Thursday in federal court in Minnesota, accusing big pork packers and Agri Stats Inc, a data analysis company, of colluding to charge artificially high prices on a host of products, from lunchmeat to Spam to barbecue ribs and sausage.
The lawsuit names Clemens Food Group, Hormel Foods Corp., Indiana Packers Corp., JBS USA, Seaboard Foods, Smithfield Foods Inc., Triumph Foods and Tyson Foods Inc.
The consumer group says these companies process 80 percent of the pork products sold in the United States.
The companies are accused of conspiring from “at least 2009 to the present to fix, raise, maintain and stabilize the price of pork.
The main method, but not the only one, was coordinating their output and limiting production with the intent and expected result of increasing pork prices in the United States," according to court documents.
