Wayne-Sanderson Farms seeks relief from antitrust actionsWayne-Sanderson Farms seeks relief from antitrust actions

DOJ Antitrust Division filed a motion seeking to force the company to abandon its use of the Agri Stats benchmarking service.

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Wayne-Sanderson Farms

Wayne-Sanderson Farms is making its own move in response to an ongoing antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice against Agri Stats Inc., a benchmarking service for protein producers.

On Jan. 18, 2025, the DOJ Antitrust Division filed a motion seeking to declare Wayne-Sanderson Farms in violation of a Consent Decree between the company and the department and to force the company to abandon its longstanding use of the Agri Stats industry benchmarking service.

Wayne-Sanderson Farms then announced Jan. 20 that it filed a motion seeking clarity and relief from the court that its participation in the Agri Stats subscription service is lawful and permitted. The company said this move was necessitated by unprecedented actions taken by the Antitrust Division.

The division is separately litigating against Agri Stats in a federal district court in Minnesota, seeking to shut down Agri Stats' business, according to the news release. Sanderson Farms and Wayne Farms, which merged in 2022, were both named as co-conspirators in the DOJ Minnesota lawsuit for allegedly using the Agri Stats reports to raise chicken prices and make broiler supply and output decisions based on competitors’ data.

According to the Wayne-Sanderson Farms filings, this latest action is a backdoor attempt by the Antitrust Division to use its Consent Decree with Wayne-Sanderson to accomplish the same goal against Agri Stats.

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The Consent Decree was entered into between the company and the Antitrust Division in 2022 upon the merger of Wayne Farms and Sanderson Farms, when the division compelled the companies to enter into a settlement of a private class action lawsuit about employee wages – unrelated to any issues surrounding the merger – in order to allow the merger to clear the DOJ review process. In addition to paying private class action plaintiffs $69.8 million, the Consent Decree required the newly combined company to endure a 10-year monitorship conducted by private attorneys called monitors working at the direction of the Antitrust Division but working at the cost of the company, Wayne-Sanderson Farms said in its news release.

"The division's filing is premature and unwarranted and a result of a poorly modeled and broken monitorship," said Jeremy Kilburn, chief legal and compliance officer of Wayne-Sanderson Farms. “In its own latest filing with the court, the company demonstrates that it has not violated the Consent Decree. Instead, the filing explains the painstaking efforts the company has undertaken to engage with the monitors and the division over the last several months to identify and resolve potential issues relating to its long-standing and well-known subscription to Agri Stats. Until the division's 2:15 a.m. filing a mere two days before the new Administration enters office, neither the monitors nor the division had conveyed what aspects of the Agri Stats reports it argues are problematic, in spite of numerous requests by the company for them to do so. 

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"To date, over the course of this nearly two year and almost $2 million monitorship, our monitors have billed for more time meeting and engaging with the division than they have for meeting and engaging with us,” Kilburn asserted. “They refused to meet with our personnel who can explain the Agri Stats service to them and correct their misunderstandings. This is not how a monitorship is supposed to work.”

Wayne-Sanderson Farms said it is hopeful that in the coming weeks the division will meaningfully engage with the company to correct its misunderstandings about the Agri Stats statistics subscription service and put an end to these wasteful proceedings. 

Wayne-Sanderson Farms, the nation's third-largest poultry producer, owns and operates 23 fresh and further-processing facilities across Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas. The company produces poultry products for retail, foodservice, restaurant, industrial and institutional segments under the brand names of Sanderson Farms fresh chicken, Covington Farms fresh and frozen chicken, Wayne Farms fresh and prepared chicken, Platinum Harvest premium fresh chicken, Chef’s Craft gourmet chicken and Naked Truth premium chicken.

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