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In re Turkey Antitrust Litigation, No. 19 C 8318, 2026 WL 1960792 (N.D. Ill. July 7, 2026)

By Matt Veldman

On July 7, Judge Sunil Harjani issued a summary judgment opinion on claims against certain defendants in the sprawling suit alleging coordinated output reduction across the turkey producer industry. The court granted summary judgment in full to defendants Perdue and Foster, finding insufficient evidence that they joined the conspiracy, while allowing plaintiffs to proceed to trial against Butterball, Jennie-O, and Prestage on their per se price-fixing claims. Other defendants, including Tyson and Agri Stats, await a separate summary judgment opinion to come at a later time.

The suit alleges a nationwide conspiracy among turkey producers to restrict output and raise prices on two occasions, first from 2008-2009, and again from 2012-2013. Defendants allegedly carried out the coordinated production cuts through direct communications with each other, through using industry reports from benchmarking company Agri Stats, and through coordinating on producing the National Turkey Federation’s 2008 Outlook Report. Plaintiffs’ per se price-fixing claims were based on these three pieces of evidence. Their rule of reason information-exchange claims based on defendants’ use of Agri Stats did not survive summary judgment, nor did their hub-and-spoke conspiracy claims based on Agri Stats. The court found no evidence of Agri Stats’ role as a hub and called the hub-and-spoke claim essentially a repackaging of the information-exchange rule of reason claim.

The evidence at summary judgment varied in strength from defendant to defendant, with the court examining first economic, then noneconomic evidence. Plaintiffs’ economic experts put forth evidence of parallel production cuts during the two time periods, but the production data showed that, while a majority of defendants cut production in each period, not all of them did. Defendants argued that plaintiffs’ claims failed because they could not show parallel conduct and parallel price increases, since defendants’ production and prices moved in different directions and at different times. But the court rejected that as a reason to grant summary judgment, emphasizing that price fixing is a per se illegal offense regardless of whether a conspiracy ends up being effective. And both production data and defendants’ own documents (for many of the defendants) showed that they did in fact cut production. Thus, while the court found the economic evidence “not particularly strong,” it found that plaintiffs adequately met their burden on economic evidence, provided they also came forward with sufficient noneconomic evidence. In re Turkey Antitrust Litigation, No. 19 C 8318, 2026 WL 1960792, at *5 (N.D. Ill. July 7, 2026).

Without smoking gun evidence of an agreement, the court focused on evidence from internal emails discussing competitor conduct, emails between competitors about supply cuts, and suspicious statements and conduct around the National Turkey Federation (“NTF,” a trade association for turkey producers) and preparing the 2008 Outlook Report. Key among this evidence was an email “trip report” written by Gary Cooper of Cooper Farms summarizing a summer 2008 NTF conference. In the email, Cooper relayed production plans learned from individuals at Cargill, Butterball, Prestage, Farbest, and Jennie-O. The level of detail Cooper gleaned from other defendants suggested that there were “open discussions amongst Defendants” about turkey production plans during the conference. Id. at *7.

This “pattern of production discussions” continued at later NTF conferences as the producers requested that Agri Stats prepare reports of “industry production intentions” and planned the 2008 Outlook Report. Id. at *8. Producers explained that they wanted the Outlook Report to “answer [] the question of what level of production will the industry need to be at in the future to cover the projected costs,” supporting the inference that a goal of the report was to “inform industry production levels.” Id. The evidence more generally also showed that in 2009, defendants were “in regular communication about their planned production cuts.” Id. at *11.

These communications made the industry outcomes less likely the result of mere conscious parallelism: the court explained that “without an agreement, a reasonable jury could conclude that there is no other reason why a processor would tell its competitor its plans to cut production, enabling the competitor to capture that market.” Id. at *7.

A couple of defendants, Perdue and Foster, escaped trial with a full win at summary judgment. For these defendants, plaintiffs did not come forward with evidence that they were directly involved with the 2008 Outlook Report, or that they communicated with their competitors. Instead, plaintiffs pointed only to internal discussions of competitors’ prices. And simply receiving Agri Stats reports without using them in a particular way (such as sharing them) was not sufficient to infer that they joined the agreement.

The court also granted summary judgment to all defendants on plaintiffs’ rule of reason information exchange claim as well as their hub-and-spoke conspiracy claim. Plaintiffs claimed that defendants agreed to exchange competitively sensitive information through production reports from Agri Stats, through which they could monitor compliance with their scheme and identify opportunities to increase their prices. The court found little evidence that the defendants were successfully and regularly deanonymizing the Agri Stats reports as a way to monitor and enforce an anticompetitive agreement (unlike in the Pork antitrust litigation, where defendants deanonymized the reports with a 60% success rate), so it granted summary judgment to all defendants on this claim. Id. at *27.

On the hub-and-spoke claim, the court found that there was “no communication” between Agri Stats and the defendants “instructing them to raise their prices.” Id. at *25. Unlike the seminal hub-and-spoke conspiracy in Toys “R” Us, in which the toy retailer actively orchestrated an anticompetitive agreement among toy manufacturers to refuse to sell to discount retailers, here there was no evidence that Agri Stats communicated, encouraged, or demanded any kind of agreement among the turkey producers. Without proving Agri Stats’ role as the “hub,” the claim was “nothing more than a reframing of their information exchange theory,” and defendants were likewise granted summary judgment on this claim. Id.

Following the July 7 order, the three remaining defendants, Butterball, Jennie-O, and Prestage, settled in quick succession with direct purchasers ahead of a scheduled October trial. Indirect purchaser plaintiffs and direct action plaintiffs remain headed for trial on a yet to be determined date.

The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the firm or its clients. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

This article was originally published in the California Lawyers Association E-Briefs, News and Notes: September 2026