Pilgrim's Pride and Tyson Foods have settled price-fixing litigation by a group of poultry buyers that accused them of violating U.S. antitrust law by conspiring to inflate chicken prices.
Pilgrim's Pride, owned mainly by Brazil's JBS, will pay $75 million to settle claims by purchasers that bought chickens directly from the company, officials said Monday. The size of Tyson's settlement with the same purchasers was not disclosed.
Neither company admitted liability, and both said settling was in their best interests.
Both settlements require approval by a federal judge in Chicago.
Neither affects claims by "indirect" purchasers, which include restaurant and supermarket operators such as Chick-fil-A, Kroger and Target as well as ordinary consumers.
They also do not affect claims against other defendants, such as Sanderson Farms and Perdue Farms.
The settlement by Pilgrim's Pride, the country's second-largest chicken producer that has a plant in Cold Spring, Minn., is the largest in more than four years of litigation by restaurants, supermarkets and food distributors over alleged price-fixing in the $65 billion chicken industry.
Already, Pilgrim's Pride entered into a $110.5 million plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of restraint of competition.
