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Minnesota Court Grants In Part And Denies In Part Motion To Dismiss Granulated Sugar Antitrust MDL
11/04/2025On October 15, 2025, Judge Jerry W. Blackwell of the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota granted in part and denied in part defendants’ motions to dismiss a multidistrict litigation alleging a conspiracy to fix prices and exchange competitively sensitive information among granulated sugar producers. In re Granulated Sugar Antitrust Litig., MDL No. 34-3110 (JWB/DTS). The Court held that plaintiffs adequately pled claims under Section 1 of the Sherman Act against two producers and an information broker based on allegedly coordinated pricing conduct facilitated by the broker, while claims against several other producers were dismissed. The Court also dismissed plaintiffs’ request for prospective injunctive relief without prejudice and largely allowed state law antitrust and consumer protection claims to proceed with limited exceptions.
Plaintiffs include three classes of sugar purchasers: direct purchasers; commercial indirect purchasers (e.g., restaurants and bakeries); and consumer indirect purchasers buying through retail. Defendants include major sugar producers and marketers, along with an information broker and its principal.
Plaintiffs allege that, from 2019 forward, defendant information broker maintained an “exclusive and secretive” clearinghouse through which defendant producers regularly provided and received contemporaneous, non‑public, and forward‑looking data including prices, pricing formulas, “sold positions” (i.e., the portion of a seller’s supply no longer available for purchase), production, costs, and profitability. Plaintiffs allege that the information exchanges enabled producers to gauge rivals’ capacity constraints and pricing intentions, to align around a formula tied to publicly reported spot prices for raw cane sugar, and to implement parallel price increases or hold firm on quoted prices without fear of being undercut. In the Court’s view, price is especially sensitive in the granulated sugar industry given it is a commodity industry with little or no differentiation where competition is based on price.
In claims alleging collusion among competitors in violation of Sherman Act Section 1, absent direct evidence of an agreement, plaintiffs may rely on circumstantial evidence of parallel conduct accompanied by “plus factors” that tend to exclude independent explanation. Further, to succeed on a standalone unlawful information‑sharing claim, plaintiffs must allege an agreement to exchange competitively sensitive information and anticompetitive effects.
The Court found alleged communications concerning competitor prices, expected price increases, and pricing formulas to be insufficient to establish an express price-fixing agreement. Therefore, the Court focused on the alleged circumstantial evidence. The Court found that plaintiffs plausibly alleged parallel pricing conduct and at least one plus factor as to two producer defendants and the broker defendant. The Court primarily relied on allegations that producers used the broker to exchange forward‑looking, firm‑specific information; discussed and applied a common pricing formula; and moved prices in tandem in close temporal proximity to when information was relayed through the broker. For example, the Court pointed to an instance where the broker defendant told one of the producer defendants to “expect to raise prices,” with price increases allegedly following soon thereafter from the broker defendant. The Court also recognized that the alleged parallel conduct was accompanied by several plus factors, including market concentration, high entry barriers, inelastic demand, and opportunities to coordinate through industry meetings and trade association boards.
The Court, however, dismissed plaintiffs’ claims as to the remaining producer defendants. The Court found that allegations against these other defendants relied too heavily on group pleading and lacked defendant‑specific facts showing reciprocal information exchanges, coordinated or temporally proximate price movements, or conduct tying them to the broker. While plaintiffs made some specific allegations against this latter group of defendants, such as one receipt of a competitor’s pricing quote, the Court found them insufficient to “nudge” agreement from conceivable to plausible.
Accordingly, the Court allowed the Sherman Act price‑fixing and information‑exchange claims to proceed against the two producer defendants implicated by the detailed broker‑based allegations, dismissed those federal claims without prejudice as to the remaining producer defendants, and denied prospective injunctive relief given the absence of post‑2021 conduct suggesting a continuing threat. Most state antitrust and “Little FTC Act” claims survived, while claims brought under deception‑based consumer protection statutes and certain unjust enrichment claims were dismissed.
