HOG WILD

The scandalous reason meat prices have skyrocketed

- MIRANDA LIPTON

THE BACON IN Your BLT now costs nearly twice as much as it did 15 years ago, but inflation is only part of the reason. Broadly speaking, food and drink prices only grew by about 50 percent during that time. So, what's up with the meat? The answer may have to do with Agri Stats, a small data venture based in Indiana. In 2023, the Department of Justice, backed by a coalition of state attorneys general, sued the company, accusing it of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act by enabling the exchange of anticompetitive information, leading to artificially high meat prices.

(Agri Stats has denied wrongdoing.) The exchange works like this: For two decades, Agri Stats has been collecting metrics from the country's largest meat processors on all kinds of things-pork and chicken-thigh inventories, production speeds, meatpacking wages. It analyzes the intel and creates reports that it distributes back to its members-dominant players that can afford to pay millions for a subscription--which use the info to set prices. Agri Stats had been running this exchange within Federal Trade Commission antitrust "safety zones" guidelines that permitted "reasonable" sharing of information between rivals in a given sector.