Sports bar owner Josh Saltzman didn't expect to open up quite the can of worms that spilled out in 2022 when he fired off a tweet about the price of frozen potatoes. He'd received notification that the four major suppliers he used for his bar's fries were each jacking up their prices by 12 cents per pound within virtually the same timeframe. "Totally not collusion or anything, right?" he posted with a screenshot of the email. For the Lever, Katya Schwenk writes that Saltzman's tweet ended up going viral, and is now cited in antitrust suits against the four companies that own 97% of the frozen potato market: Lamb Weston, the JR Simplot Company, McCain Foods, and Cavendish Farms.
Schwenk explains that lax antimonopoly regulation in the '90s allowed these four companies to become giants, eventually elbowing out the small fries. And now the suits claim that by sharing data using a third-party analytics program called PotatoTrac, the potato "cartel" has used technology as a backdoor for price-fixing. (Lamb Weston calls the suits frivolous, and the other companies have not commented.) "It's really not all that different from a handful of executives getting into a room," says Sarah Carden of watchdog group Farm Action. "These are supposed to be competitors, but they're sharing all of this proprietary data." And Big Potato isn't the only food supplier in on the data-sharing game, writes Schwenk. Read the full story. (Grocery shopping is most expensive in Alaska and Hawaii.)
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