In November 2024, a federal class action was filed against the four companies that supply roughly 98% of the United States’ frozen-potato market — McCain Foods, Lamb Weston, J.R. Simplot, and Cavendish Farms.
The market, per the complaint, is worth approximately $68 billion.
The platform through which plaintiffs allege these companies coordinated their pricing is named PotatoTrac.
We are not editorializing. That is the name.
The mechanism
According to the complaint, PotatoTrac is a private industry tool that provided defendants visibility into one another’s non-public, “competitively sensitive” pricing and production data.
The plaintiffs’ filing describes the alleged purpose plainly:
“…so that no price competition takes place.”
The Daily Spud is required, in the interest of journalistic integrity, to report that quote without further comment.
The numbers
Between July 2022 and July 2024, wholesale prices for frozen potato products rose approximately 47%.
Over the same period, input costs fell.
The complaint further alleges that defendants intentionally avoided digital communication when coordinating, in order to make the coordination harder to subpoena. This is a level of operational discipline the American frozen tater tot industry was not previously known for.
The class
The plaintiffs are restaurants, food-service distributors, and other commercial purchasers of frozen potato products. They allege the coordination resulted in years of artificially elevated wholesale prices, which were ultimately passed through to American consumers in the form of fries, hash browns, and tater tots that cost more than they should have.
The case is in early proceedings. No defendant has been found liable. The Daily Spud presumes innocence as a matter of editorial policy and federal law.
Editorial position
The Daily Spud is monitoring this federal antitrust litigation closely.
The integrity of the American hash brown supply chain is a matter we are not prepared to take lightly.
This is the first entry in what we anticipate will be an ongoing segment: The Cartel Update. We will report further developments as the litigation progresses.
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