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Shop NowWithout anyone realizing it, a “potato cartel” of four giants cornered the market and allegedly started conspiring to fix prices. Frozen varieties from french fries to hash browns and all the assorted shapes in between come from four companies. Between them, they rake in around $68 billion each year. Multiple lawsuits claim they’ve been gouging the public.
Potato monopoly
For decades, larger potato processors have been swallowing up their smaller competitors. Today, there are four big fish sharing the whole pond. “Lamb Weston, Canada-based McCain Foods, the J.R. Simplot Company and Cavendish Farms.” It’s the Canadian one that’s responsible for Ore-Ida.
Between them, they “control 97% of the market.” That makes them a target for “antitrust lawsuits filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in November.”
If you noticed the price of your favorite products going up steadily, it wasn’t entirely Joe Biden’s fault.
“Between July 2022 and July 2024, these tater titans sent the price of frozen potato products soaring 47% by colluding to raise prices.” It was simply too tempting for Simplot and Ore-Ida yelled “alrighta!”
“When there are only a handful of players in the market, collusion is too appetizing for these companies to pass up,” Lindsay Owens explains. She’s executive director of economic think tank Groundwork Collaborative.
The potato twisters “blamed the increases on the rising cost of operations.” That’s misleading. Their costs dropped back down but the prices remained high.
Obvious collusion
The potato barons totally deny any conspiracy or collusion to fix prices, no matter what the lawsuits filed by the restaurant industry allege. Even so, plaintiff Josh Saltzman has evidence they did.
In April of 2022, the sports bar owner “received a notice from his food distributor that the four major suppliers were each hiking their prices by 12 cents per pound.” He instantly posted it on social media. “Totally not collusion or anything, right?”
It was hard to miss when the big four all raised prices the exact same amount within a week of each other. The lawyers have a batch of emails to back that up.
“Court documents allege executives at the frozen potato companies made comments alluding to the price fixing scheme, though it’s unclear when and where the comments were made.”
On top of that, in 2023, “a former McCain Foods director allegedly said they wanted to compete with Lamb Weston on pricing.” In other words, cut their own a few cents to pick up more volume. They were told not to. By “higher ups in the room.”
Later that year, on former Lamb Weston executive noted that the other three were “behaving themselves.” They had “never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry.” Now that they’re busted, we should see more reasonable prices.
