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Federal Judge Rules On Summary Judgment And Sends Turkey Price-Fixing Claims To Trial
08/04/2026On July 7, 2026, Judge Sunil R. Harjani of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois issued a Memorandum Opinion and Order resolving five summary judgment motions in the consolidated turkey price-fixing litigation. In re Turkey Antitrust Litigation, No. 19 C8318 (N.D. Ill. July 7, 2026). The ruling granted defendants’ motion for summary judgement on plaintiffs’ rule of reason claims, but set the stage for two upcoming jury trials on the per se Sherman Act claims: the first from direct purchaser plaintiffs against defendants Butterball LLC, Jennie-O Turkey Store, Inc., and Prestage Farms of South Carolina and the second trial against the same defendants from indirect purchasers and direct action plaintiffs.
Plaintiffs comprise three groups: direct purchaser plaintiffs (national grocery stores and similar buyers); commercial and institutional indirect purchaser plaintiffs (restaurant chains); and direct action plaintiffs (grocery retailers and food service companies that brough individual suits). They allege that the nation’s largest turkey processors engaged in a conspiracy to reduce supply and artificially inflate the price of turkey meat from January 1, 2010, through December 31, 2016 by coordinating production cuts resulting in supracompetitive prices. Plaintiffs advanced two theories of liability under Section 1 of the Sherman Act: First, a per se claim alleging that defendants directly communicated with one another, participated in conferences, and created sector forecasts and outlook reports that all supported and constituted an agreement to reduce supply. Second, plaintiffs brought a rule-of-reason claim alleging defendants’ exchange of competitively sensitive information through a benchmarking firm constituted an independent antitrust violation.
All five defendants sought summary judgment on both the per se and rule-of-reason claims. Defendants made three principal arguments. First, they contended that plaintiffs could not demonstrate parallel production reductions because certain defendants increased production during the alleged conspiracy periods, and that the economic evidence was insufficient to establish coordinated behavior. Second, they argued that any inter-competitor communications and attendance at trade association meetings reflected ordinary business conduct rather than conspiratorial agreement and that independent economic justifications (such as the Great Recession, elevated feed costs, and strategic business shifts) explained their production decisions. Third, defendants maintained that the third-party reports were anonymized benchmarking tools with no demonstrated anticompetitive effect.
Viewing all the evidence, the Court denied three defendants summary judgement on the per se claims and granted motions of the remaining two defendants, finding that a reasonable jury could find that some defendants conspired to restrain supply in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. The Court also granted all five defendants summary judgement on the rule of reason claims.
On the per se claims, the Court found that while the economic evidence of parallel production cuts is not dispositive, it was sufficient to deny certain defendants’ motion for summary judgement when combined with evidence of communications between competitors. Specifically, the Court identified substantial evidence of information exchange at conference committee meetings, involvement in the creation of the 2008 Outlook Report through a steering committee, and direct inter-competitor communications about production plans and cuts. Language within defendants’ internal documents such as “do our part” and “industry discipline” further supported an inference of coordinated action.
By contrast, the Court granted summary judgment to the remaining two defendants’ per se claims, finding that neither had engaged in direct communications sufficient to support a reasonable inference of agreement. Specifically, the Court stated that awareness of and benefit from competitors’ actions does not establish joining a conspiracy, but rather typical competitive awareness.
On the rule-of-reason claims, the Court granted summary judgment in favor of all defendants, concluding that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that information exchanged through the anonymized industry reports had a substantial anticompetitive effect. Plaintiffs argued that defendants could use flock and breeder data to monitor compliance with the alleged scheme, could use pricing reports to identify “opportunities” to raise prices, and that defendants had deanonymized the reports to facilitate the conspiracy. The Court found no evidence that defendants actually used the reports in the manner plaintiffs theorized, and noted that aggregated, third-party report data is more analogous to lawful information exchange cases rather than conspiratorial information exchanges.
Finally, the Court rejected the direct action plaintiffs’ hub-and-spoke theory for the rule of reason claim, which alleged that the benchmarking defendant orchestrated horizontal agreements among the processors. Specifically, the Court found that plaintiffs’ evidence that defendants distributed current prices as compared to national averages was not analogous to leading precedents because it neither induced processors into price changes nor assured processors that other market participants would comply with any reported prices.
The direct purchasers’ per se claims are set for trial on October 8, 2026. The indirect purchaser and direct action plaintiff claims will be set for a separate trial that will follow at a later date.
Antitrust Litigation