The Potato Cartel That Charged You 43% More — While Their Own Costs Dropped

A sitting executive at one of the four companies controlling your frozen French fry supply said out loud, in recorded statements, that his company and its competitors had “no incentive to fight that hard for each other’s market share” — and then called their coordinated price gouging “behaving themselves.”

This is the story of how four corporations carved up the frozen potato market, used a Chicago-based data company to spy on each other’s prices, and quietly drained hundreds of millions of dollars from American grocery shoppers — all while their ingredient costs were actually falling.

Four Companies Own Your Freezer Aisle

The Market Is Basically a Private Club

The frozen potato market in the United States is one of the most concentrated markets in the entire food industry. Four companies — Lamb Weston, McCain Foods, J.R. Simplot Co. (JRS), and Cavendish Farms — control virtually every bag of frozen fries, every carton of tater tots, and every box of hash browns sold in this country.

According to the lawsuit, Lamb Weston holds approximately 40% of the market, McCain holds roughly 30%, JRS holds approximately 20%, and Cavendish holds between 7% and 8%. That adds up to 97–98% market control in the hands of four boardrooms. The potato sector contributed over $100 billion ($100 billion — more than the GDP of most countries, and more than the U.S. government spends on food assistance programs in two years) to the U.S. economy in 2021 alone, and approximately 39% of all potatoes grown in the United States end up frozen for downstream sale.

These are not luxury items. Frozen fries are a budget staple. They fill school cafeteria trays, hospital meal trays, and the grocery bags of families stretching a paycheck. There is no real substitute for them — the complaint explicitly states that “potatoes cannot be replaced.” That inelasticity is exactly what the cartel exploited.

The Tool That Made the Cartel Work

None of this would have been possible without Circana, LLC. Circana, headquartered in Chicago, runs a proprietary data service called PotatoTrac — a system that has been collecting the private, competitively sensitive pricing and shipment data from all four frozen potato processors since at least 2008. A 2008 PotatoTrac report described the service as “a cooperative, wholesale and foodservice measurement service providing individual item level data for all frozen potato shipments from the four major frozen potato processors — Cavendish, Lamb Weston, McCain and JRS — to all U.S. foodservice customers.”

Here is how the mechanics work: each company feeds its own pricing and supply data into PotatoTrac. In return, Circana compiles all four companies’ data and plays it back to all of them simultaneously. The lawsuit describes Circana as “enforcing” this understanding — “requiring Defendants to share data in order to receive comparable data.” The result is that each cartel member could see, in near real-time, exactly what their supposed competitors were charging and shipping.

The National Potato Promotion Board (NPPB), a trade association funded by assessments on potato producers, served as a secondary coordination hub. NPPB distributed PotatoTrac data through quarterly reports and press releases, and also created a legal, face-to-face channel for the four companies to communicate directly. The NPPB also imposed a $0.03 per hundredweight financial penalty on imported potatoes — functionally a deterrent against foreign competition that might otherwise force domestic prices down.

The Paper Trail: A Year-by-Year Record of Coordinated Price Hikes

They Moved in Lockstep. Every Single Time.

The complaint documents a specific, sequential timeline of coordinated price increases that defy any innocent explanation. Each event follows the same pattern: one company announces a price increase, and within days — sometimes within 24 hours — the others announce identical or nearly identical increases.

The Cover-Up: Switching to Texts to Avoid a Paper Trail

According to the complaint — citing a parallel antitrust lawsuit — Lamb Weston issued an internal directive telling its managers to stop emailing competitive pricing information and business intelligence to each other. Instead, they were told to switch to text messages. The explicit reason given: to avoid creating evidence in the event of an antitrust investigation.

That is a company actively coaching its own employees on how to hide what they are doing. That is a company that knew exactly what it was doing was illegal. This detail, buried in the complaint as a citation to another case, is one of the most damning pieces of evidence in the entire filing.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What This Cost Real People

This Is a Tax on Being Poor

Frozen potato products — fries, tater tots, hash browns — are purchased disproportionately by working-class and low-income families. They are cheap, long-lasting, and require minimal preparation. They are the kind of food you buy when you are feeding a family of four on a tight budget and need something that will not go bad before Friday. The defendants in this case knew all of this. The complaint explicitly acknowledges that FPPs are an “inelastic good” — meaning people keep buying them even when prices go up, because there is no real alternative.

That inelasticity is the entire point of the scheme. The cartel did not target a luxury product where consumers could simply walk away. They targeted a staple. They targeted the freezer aisle of every Ralph’s, every uncle Giuseppe’s, every Walmart in America. The 43% price increase that consumers absorbed during the conspiracy period (January 2021 to present) did not come out of a discretionary fund — it came out of grocery budgets already stretched thin by pandemic job losses, inflation, and stagnant wages.

Plaintiff Alexander Govea is presented as a representative plaintiff — a Virginia resident who bought frozen potato products at a supermarket in Los Angeles and a supermarket on Long Island. He is not a hedge fund manager seeking consequential damages on a derivative contract. He is a grocery shopper who got overcharged for a bag of fries. That is the scale at which this harm operates: at the checkout line, one overpriced bag at a time, multiplied across tens of millions of households nationwide.

The Invisible Architecture of the Rip-Off

What makes this conspiracy particularly infuriating is how invisible it was designed to be. The cartel did not need to meet in a hotel conference room. They did not need to send a memo that said “let’s fix prices.” They subscribed to PotatoTrac, fed their data in, and let Circana’s analytics platform do the coordination for them. The result was the same as a back-room handshake — identical price increases, announced days apart, by companies that publicly claimed to be fierce competitors.

The complaint documents a moment that captures this perfectly. In September 2021, a Lamb Weston vice president — before his own company had even finished its internal price increase announcement — predicted with complete confidence that McCain Foods would match them, down to the exact same amount. He was right. That kind of certainty about a competitor’s pricing decision does not come from reading the news. It comes from a shared data system that strips all uncertainty from the competitive landscape.

Betrayal by Institutions Designed to Help

The National Potato Promotion Board presents itself as a public-interest body working to “strengthen demand for potatoes” and help American potato growers. Its website talks about research, market access programs, and export assistance. What the complaint alleges is something quite different: NPPB served as a legally sanctioned meeting space and communication channel that the cartel members used to stay coordinated, share data, and keep prices elevated. NPPB’s own press releases, citing PotatoTrac data, functioned as industry-wide pricing signals — telling all four companies simultaneously which direction prices were trending and by how much.

The NPPB assessment structure is particularly galling. Potato producers pay into NPPB based on the amount they produce, giving every cartel member a financial stake in keeping the association funded and functional. Meanwhile, the $0.03 per hundredweight assessment on potato imports acts as a financial penalty on foreign competition — a built-in mechanism to suppress the supply increases that would otherwise push prices down. The trade association that was supposed to promote American potatoes was also helping ensure that American consumers would never see the competitive prices a real market would produce.

Legal Receipts: The Words They Actually Said

Straight From the Source Documents — No Paraphrasing

“In 2023, a former vice president at Lamb Weston stated that Lamb Weston, JRS and McCain ‘have never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry.'” — Class Action Complaint, Para. 39. Filed November 17, 2024.

“He stated that the three were seeing these high margins because the horizontal competitors have ‘no incentive to fight that hard for each other’s [market] share’ and because each of the potato cartel defendants were ‘behaving themselves.'” — Class Action Complaint, Para. 40. Describing statements by a former Lamb Weston Vice President.

“During the conspiracy period, a former senior director for McCain Foods stated that McCain was essentially unwilling to compete with Lamb Weston on significant portions of the FPP market (the price of battered French fries), stating ‘the higher ups’ advised against it.” — Class Action Complaint, Para. 2.

“JRS’s director of sales stated that, when customers threatened to switch to another member of the potato cartel that ‘we knew but we weren’t worried about it.'” — Class Action Complaint, Para. 2. A J.R. Simplot sales director confirming that losing customers to a cartel competitor carried zero competitive risk.

“According to at least one other antitrust action, Lamb Weston issued a directive to employees involved in potato cartel conduct, asking managers at the company to refrain from emailing information about competitor pricing and business intelligence – and, instead, use texting in the event of an antitrust investigation.” — Class Action Complaint, Para. 3. Citing Redner’s Markets, Inc. v. Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc., filed November 15, 2024.

“A 2008 Q3 PotatoTrac report described PotatoTrac as ‘a cooperative, wholesale and foodservice measurement service providing [individual item] level data for all frozen potato shipments from the four major frozen potato processors – Cavendish, Lamb Weston, McCain and JRS – to all U.S. foodservice customers as well as foodservice exports from the U.S. to foreign countries.’ The report continues, ‘[t]he data collected is categorized, and combined totals are played back to … those four processors[.]'” — Class Action Complaint, Para. 42. Describing Circana/NPD’s PotatoTrac service dating back to 2008.

Societal Impact: Who Really Paid the Price

Economic Inequality: Price-Fixing as a Class War Tactic

The complaint documents a 43% retail price increase on frozen potato products over the conspiracy period (2021–present), during a stretch of time when the cost of the raw potato inputs used to make those products was simultaneously falling. This is not an anomaly. This is the deliberate extraction of money from consumers using market power. The gap between input costs and retail prices — which should have narrowed as ingredient costs dropped — instead exploded upward, because the four companies controlling the market agreed not to compete.

The NPPB’s own data, cited in the complaint, confirms the mechanism: between July 2023 and June 2024, frozen potato products saw a 14.6% increase in dollar sales — driven entirely by “sharp increases in price,” not by any increase in volume. People did not suddenly start eating more frozen fries. They simply paid more for the same amount. That 14.6% dollar-sales increase in a single 12-month window represents a direct wealth transfer from grocery shoppers — disproportionately working-class and fixed-income households — to the corporate shareholders of four multinational food processors.

The economic injury scales across virtually every U.S. state. The lawsuit names plaintiffs and class members in 28 states and territories, including Arizona, California, Illinois, New York, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Puerto Rico. The conspiracy’s reach is national. There is no zip code in America where people do not buy frozen potatoes. Every one of those consumers overpaid, and — critically — none of them knew it.

Lamb Weston alone reported segment sales exceeding $4.2 billion ($4.2 billion — enough to fund a year of free school lunches for more than 4 million American children) in 2023. Those margins, described by the company’s own former vice president as historically unprecedented, were not the product of innovation, efficiency, or superior products. They were the product of a data-sharing scheme that let four companies act as one. When profits hit records at the exact same time that consumer prices hit records, and that same time that executives are on record saying they have “no incentive to compete” — that is the full picture of what happened.

Public Health: Food Security Is a Health Issue

The downstream purchasers of frozen potato products include “the food service sector (which is the largest buying segment for processed potatoes), followed by restaurants, hotels, schools and hospitals.” The complaint identifies schools and hospitals specifically — institutions serving the most vulnerable Americans, operating on fixed public budgets, with no ability to absorb price shocks by passing costs to someone else. When the price of frozen potatoes increases by 43%, school districts face a direct choice: reduce portion sizes, cut other menu items, or drain money from elsewhere in an already-strained budget.

The health consequences of artificially elevated food prices fall hardest on the families least able to absorb them. Food insecurity is one of the strongest predictors of poor health outcomes in the United States, particularly for children. When a cartel drains money from working-class grocery budgets, those families do not have a neutral reserve fund to draw from. They cut elsewhere. They buy less food overall. They substitute lower-nutrition options. The cartel’s price hike lands not as an abstraction but as a material constraint on what families can put on the table — and, consequently, on the health of those families.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now: Who Is Watching and What You Can Do

The Corporate Roles at the Center of This Investigation

• Chief Executive Officers of Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc. / McCain Foods Limited / J.R. Simplot Co. / Cavendish Farms Ltd. [REDACTED – Not in Source: individual names not named in the complaint]
• Former Vice President of International Business, Lamb Weston (quoted in complaint as confirming record-high margins and cartel “behavior”)
• Former Senior Director, McCain Foods (quoted confirming refusal to compete, on orders from “higher ups”)
• Director of Sales, J.R. Simplot Co. (quoted confirming lockstep pricing and indifference to customer defection threats)
• Senior Leadership, Circana, LLC (operator of PotatoTrac since at least 2008)
• Leadership, National Potato Promotion Board d/b/a Potatoes USA (Denver, CO)

Regulatory Watchlist: Who Has Authority to Act

• Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ): Primary federal enforcement authority for Sherman Act violations. This case was filed in federal court — DOJ can open a parallel criminal investigation.
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Has authority to investigate deceptive and anticompetitive trade practices, including information-sharing schemes used to facilitate price-fixing.
• State Attorneys General: The complaint names violations in 28 U.S. states and territories. Every state AG in that list has independent authority to investigate and prosecute under state antitrust law.

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Evil Corporations neglecting safety protocols to cut costs, risking consumer harm for higher profits: https://evilcorporations.com/category/product-safety-violations/
Evil Corporations deliberately contaminating ecosystems to avoid expenses, prioritizing greed over sustainability: https://evilcorporations.com/category/environmental-violations/
Evil Corporations exploiting workers through unsafe conditions and unfair wages to maximize corporate gains: https://evilcorporations.com/category/labor-exploitation/
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Evil Corporations manipulating records to mislead stakeholders, enabling illicit wealth accumulation and systemic corruption: https://evilcorporations.com/category/financial-fraud/
Evil Corporations deceiving consumers with false claims to manipulate demand and conceal product risks: https://evilcorporations.com/category/misleading-marketing/
Evil Corporations doing corporate misconduct that doesn’t neatly fit into the earlier mentioned categories: https://evilcorporations.com/category/misc/

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