‘Big Four’ meatpackers under fire as beef prices soar

On 21 November, at the end of the first shift at the Tyson Foods beef processing plant in Lexington, Nebraska, all workers were called to the lunchroom and told they no longer had jobs. Many gathered afterward in the gravel parking lot. Some wailed and cried out.

“It’s a terrible thing to know that we won’t be able to pay rent, won’t be able to pay the electricity, our cars – all the bills coming our way,” said Constancio Perales, a 64-year-old worker born in Durango, Mexico, who has worked at the plant since 1996 – the last 25 years cutting the bone out of chuck steaks. “It’s very sad that they would fire us like that – just telling us there’s no more work, as if to say go away.”

And the move didn’t seem to make sense. Tyson is one of four beef producers – along with JBS, Cargill and National Beef, known collectively as “the Big Four” – that control 85% of the industry, and their profit margins are at their highest levels in years as consumer prices soar. Tyson had just announced that its profits were up 6.5% over the previous year. Why would the company shut down one of its largest plants, employing 3,200 workers?

In a statement at the time, Tyson said it was working to “right size its beef business and position it for long-term success” and that it will meet consumer demand by increasing production at other company facilities, “optimizing volumes across our network”.

Dan Osborn, an independent Senate candidate in Nebraska who got into politics after leading a strike of Kellogg’s workers in Omaha in 2021, didn’t believe that explanation. He went on social media to charge that the plant closing was the continuation of a longstanding pattern. A class action lawsuit brought in 2019 by a coalition of cattle ranchers and feedlot owners, led by the Ranchers-Cattlemen Legal Action Fund (R-CALF), claimed that the Big Four were engaged in an “illegal scheme” of “price-fixing, market manipulation and unfair practices”, carried out by constricting production, including plant closures, to drive down the price of cattle for slaughter and drive up the price of processed beef by creating artificial scarcity.

“This is a time of near record high beef prices and demand for beef,” Osborn wrote on X. “In a real free market, one would expect packers to want to increase capacity to meet this demand. At a minimum, they wouldn’t idle capacity for fear of ceding market share to competitors – who might take advantage of the high prices to expand their own production. But Tyson is doing the opposite. Why?” He answered his own question: “Tyson made a calculation that the profits they will reap manipulating market prices by shutting down this giant plant will EXCEED any loss they incur.” (In October, Tyson agreed to pay $55m to consumers who claimed that the company colluded with other beef producers to inflate prices, and in January agreed to pay an additional $87m to a group of small grocers and retailers of case-ready beef. Tyson denied wrongdoing in both cases.)

Beef prices have become a flashpoint among broader concerns about the overall rise in the cost of living. Over the past several years – and in recent months – the growth in beef prices have far outpaced the growth in the US consumer price index.

From January 2020 to December 2025, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis shows, the average price of beef steaks soared from $7.65 a pound to $12.51 a pound – an increase of just over 63%, while the general rate of inflation rose roughly 25% over that period. (Ground beef saw a similar jump.) During the first year of the second Trump administration – from February to December last year – the average price of steaks climbed from $10.87 a pound to $12.51 a pound, a jump of 15%. Overall consumer prices increased 2.2% over those same months.

In response to what they allege is years of price-gouging and collusion, many of the Big Four’s business partners have filed lawsuits – including grocery store chains Kroger and Aldi, big-box stores Target and BJ’s Wholesale Club, food distributors including Sysco and Sodexo, and burger giant McDonald’s. Donald Trump felt compelled to call for action, directing the US Department of Justice, in a post on Truth Social in November, to open an inquiry “into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef”.

A statement issued by R-CALF applauded Trump, asking that he ensure “that consumers pay prices set by a competitive market rather than a monopolistic one”. Tyson Foods and National Beef did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in response to the antitrust lawsuit said the plaintiffs had to “dream up an elaborate scheme” to explain normal market corrections. A spokesperson for JBS said only that the company “remains firmly committed to producing safe, high quality, affordable food for American families and consumers around the world”. A spokesperson for Cargill directed questions to the Meat Institute – the lobbying organization that represents members of the Big Four and other large meatpackers – which issued a statement claiming that “beef packers have been losing money because the price of cattle is at record highs”.

Osborn doesn’t buy it. The price of cattle has increased, but only marginally, while prices at the grocery store have soared. He offered his own shopping experience as proof. “I was standing in front of the big meat aisle, and I was just looking at the beef,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s $17.99 a pound for sirloin steak, and a couple years ago, I was paying $5.99, maybe $6.99, for that same sirloin steak.” (Osborn supplied a photo as proof of the current price.) “I find it very, very hard to believe that this is not being manipulated.”

Here’s how the alleged scheme Osborn and others are describing works, according to documents filed in multiple lawsuits against the beef packers.

From 2009 to 2014, the Big Four were paying steadily increasing prices for cattle. This was due to a shortage brought on by drought, which had spurred cattlemen to reduce their herds. The packers responded to the higher prices by closing a total of five plants between January 2013 and September 2014, including one of Cargill’s largest plants in Plainview, Texas, which processed more than 4,500 head per day – roughly 5% of all beef production in the country. Ranchers and small feedlot owners with full-grown, fattened cattle don’t have space or feed to wait out a dip in buying, so they were forced to accept a lower price.

The cattlemen say that was the intended effect: cattle prices leveled off in November 2014. Industry experts expected prices to remain steady in 2015 and for several years after, before experiencing a gradual decline as the drought eased and the inventory of cattle was replenished. But, according to court filings by the cattlemen, the Big Four didn’t want to wait for prices of cattle to come down on their own. Emboldened by the effectiveness of their earlier alleged manipulation, the class action suit alleges, the packers “colluded to make sure, notwithstanding growing beef demand, that this widely predicted period of price stability would never happen”.

This time, the suit alleges, they came up with a system in which the heads of operations at all of the Big Four were in direct communication to temporarily halt buying and slaughtering if cattle prices got too high. Because the packers control so much of the market, even a temporary reduction of kills immediately depressed market prices. When those prices hit an agreed-upon level, the lawsuit alleges, packers simultaneously resumed buying. The alleged scheme worked so well that prices for cattle across the US collapsed dramatically in 2015 and then stabilized, but below the prior trend line.

This collusion, according to the lawsuit, increased “the meat margin” – the spread between the price paid by big packers for “fed cattle” (cattle fattened in feedlots and ready for slaughter) and the price they can charge Kroger, Target or McDonald’s. “Even with the drastic collapse in fed cattle prices caused by [the Big Four’s] conspiracy,” the lawsuit claims, the meatpackers “continued to benefit from record beef prices”, allowing them “to post record per-head meat margins”. (In response, the packers questioned the credibility of key witnesses and denied any allegations of coordinated efforts to keep prices low. In a motion to dismiss, they argued that “fed cattle and beef markets are concentrated commodity markets – where companies should be expected to respond similarly to market forces”.)

In short, the suit charges, they were simultaneously using their dominance of the market to depress the prices paid to cattle ranchers for their supply, while artificially keeping prices high.

For the alleged scheme to work, no one could betray the others by offering a higher price to the cattlemen. By the middle of 2015, Cassandra Fish, a former Tyson risk manager and then a market analyst with the trade journal the Beef, noted the “incredible discipline” among packers in making coordinated decisions to modify the number of kills. “Most have cut hours,” she wrote in June. “So will someone break ranks, pay up for cattle and add hours?” In other words, wouldn’t some company pay the higher prices and increase production?

The answer was no – not for years. Data gathered by the cattlemen show that production rose and fell in unison.

The Big Four attribute this to market conditions, and argue that it is not sufficient evidence of “parallel conduct”. But even when Tyson lost its plant in Holcomb, Kansas, to a fire in 2019, shuttering the plant for four months and slashing the company’s annual slaughter capacity, the other producers didn’t use the disaster as an opportunity, according to the cattlemen’s lawsuit. Instead, the cattlemen claim, the other members of the Big Four cut their production, too.

This was the tip-off, the lawsuit says, that proved the collusion.

Again, the Big Four attribute their shared low demand to “market forces”. But the cattlemen dispute this claim. “Supply and demand principles do not explain the 2015 price collapse or subsequent low prices,” the lawsuit alleges. The drought had receded, making it possible to increase the inventory of cattle, and demand by Americans for beef had only increased. But the Big Four still weren’t buying cattle above a certain price, and it was working. The price for a single cow ready for slaughter fell from $170 in January 2015 to less than $100 in September 2019.

The evidence supplied by the cattlemen was compelling enough that many of the largest companies that buy from the Big Four eventually filed lawsuits of their own – claiming that the Big Four weren’t just shorting the cattlemen; they were also gouging wholesale distributors, grocers and fast food chains, which, in turn, passed the pain along to customers. The most notable suit came from McDonald’s, which, in a complaint filed in federal court in New York in 2024, claimed that “the market for beef became a monopoly”, because the large processors “collude with seeming impunity”, acting as “a single enterprise to advance their conspiracy”.

In other words, according to the lawsuit, the Big Four control so much of the market for beef in this country that they constitute a cartel capable of overpowering McDonald’s, an iconic corporation with more than 13,000 stores in the US selling north of 5m hamburgers each day. The meatpackers again denied any wrongdoing, saying that descriptions of a concentrated market do not constitute evidence of conspiracy.

The Big Four’s business partners – from the cattlemen to the Golden Arches – say the strongest proof of the meatpackers’ stranglehold on prices emerged during the pandemic.

The Covid-19 virus spread unevenly among their packing plants, forcing closures in some areas of the country while plants in other places were able to remain open. In theory, that should have created an ever-shifting market, depending on which producer had more plants in active operation.

For example, in early May 2020, two giant beef plants in Nebraska – the Tyson Foods plant in Dakota City and the Cargill plant in Schuyler – were shut down due to Covid concerns. Those plants could process a combined 13,000 animals per day, more than 10% of the country’s total cattle slaughter. But JBS and National Beef didn’t move to seize that portion of the market with their plants in other locations. Instead, they reduced cattle purchases to match their competitors – and all of the Big Four raised prices to their clients. The cost of choice cuts of beef – ribeye, New York strip, filet mignon – doubled, while the price paid to ranchers for slaughter-ready cattle dropped 30%.

But all four companies reduced production, according to data collected by the cattlemen, even at plants that were functioning. By the last week of April 2020, nearly 40% of the nation’s beef processing capacity was offline as plants were idled due to Covid-19 illnesses among plant employees.

Complaints from ranchers grew so loud that the US Department of Agriculture widened an existing investigation into allegations of price-fixing that was opened after the Tyson fire in 2019. But it wasn’t until May 2020, after attorneys general from 11 states issued a letter urging the US Department of Justice to investigate the beef industry, that Trump finally took action.

The justice department issued civil subpoenas to the Big Four, specifically seeking any evidence of collusion, and simultaneously opened a criminal investigation into poultry producers, including criminal indictments of the CEO and former vice-president of Pilgrim’s Pride, a subsidiary of JBS. Among other evidence cited in the indictments, the justice department described text messages from executives at Pilgrim’s directing employees to be in touch with supposed competitors to raise their prices. In one message, a Pilgrim’s manager reported to the CEO: “They are listening to my direction.”

Within months, JBS’s Brazilian parent company settled a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) investigation brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The US investigation had begun after a police investigation in Brazil concluded that JBS’s owners, Joesley and Wesley Batista, had systematically offered bribes to public officials in order to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from a state-owned bank. The SEC concluded that those ill-gotten loans had been used to facilitate JBS’s 2009 acquisition of Pilgrim’s Pride – allowing the Brazilian conglomerate to increase its control over the American food supply.

Charles Cain, chief of the SEC’s foreign corrupt practices enforcement unit, bluntly accused JBS and Pilgrim of “engaging in bribery to finance their expansion into the US markets and then continuing to engage in bribery while occupying senior board positions at Pilgrim’s”. These were, he added, examples of “brazen misconduct” and, in the language of bureaucratic understatement, “a profound failure to exercise good corporate governance”.

Between 2009 and 2020, according to the SEC, JBS officials had paid bribes to obtain loans to purchase American companies, funneled those payments through US banks, and then filed falsified books to cover up those payments, while simultaneously engaging in illegal collusion and price-fixing to boost their profits by cutting American cattle ranchers and other livestock producers out of their share of the market. JBS, its Brazilian parent company and the Batistas “consented” to the SEC’s finding that they “caused Pilgrim’s Pride’s violations of the books and records and internal accounting controls provisions of the FCPA”. JBS paid $27m in fines. The parent company also pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to violate the FCPA” and paid more than $250m as a “criminal penalty”. The agreement saved JBS from criminal charges, but the company’s bid to be publicly traded in the US was effectively ended – and the criminal cases against Pilgrim’s Pride executives proceeded to trial.

In early 2021, Tyson paid more than $221m to settle a private class action alleging price-fixing in the poultry industry. But the attempt to take on the biggest of the Big Four, JBS, during the Biden administration unraveled in 2021 and 2022.

Criminal trials in Colorado, where JBS and Pilgrim’s Pride are headquartered, ultimately ended in an acquittal of the executives – despite what the Wall Street Journal described as “cooperating witnesses and mounds of evidence, including phone calls, emails and text messages over several years that showed competitors talking about their prices”. The defendants argued that sharing price information isn’t illegal and said they never agreed to set prices.

The justice department dropped the remaining criminal charges, but an executive order issued by Biden promised to work toward increasing competition in the beef industry. But nothing changed. The justice department investigation into the Big Four technically remained open, but no new prosecutions were brought, and longstanding lawsuits seemed to stall or produce small settlements.

Beef prices continued to climb. By early 2024, the price of steak was up more than 30% from its pre-pandemic price, even though the cost of cattle had steeply declined. The Big Four blamed inflation, but their prices had risen at more than double the rate of other consumer goods. As the 2024 presidential campaign heated up, food prices became a central issue with voters. Biden dropped out of the race in July, but unchecked food costs under his administration – driven by skyrocketing staples like beef and eggs – dogged his vice-president, Kamala Harris, as she tried to pick up the campaign, and turned races against Democrats down the ballot.

In November, Trump surged back to the White House, in part by repeatedly promising that he would bring voters’ grocery bills under control. “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on day one,” he said in August 2024.

That hasn’t happened.

At Trump’s inauguration, press coverage focused on the support of tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and PayPal, as they raced to curry favor with the White House by giving millions in donations. Less attention was paid to the fact that the largest single donor to the inauguration – contributing as much as those tech giants combined – was Pilgrim’s Pride, the embattled JBS subsidiary that Trump’s justice department had been investigating fewer than five years earlier.

Weeks into his new term, the Trump administration removed key members of the agencies that had kept open the investigation of JBS under Biden. And then, by executive order, Trump paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cain, the enforcement chief, resigned in April, and that same month, the SEC allowed JBS to offer shares on the New York Stock Exchange, increasing its capitalization by billions of dollars.

In September, it was reported that Trump’s justice department had quietly closed the longstanding investigation of the Big Four. In 2018, under the first Trump administration, another Brazilian company, Marfrig, had acquired a controlling share in National Beef. That means that just months into his second term, “America first” Donald Trump had allowed two foreign companies to gain a powerful position in the American beef market without meaningful fear of oversight or investigation – even as prices at the grocery checkout and drive-thru window continued to soar.

Weeks later, as “affordability” began to dominate political and media narratives, Trump announced the US would boost its cattle inventory by quadrupling the amount of Argentinian beef allowed to enter the country at a lower tariff rate each year. “If we do that,” Trump told a group of reporters aboard Air Force One, “that will bring our beef prices down.” American ranchers were dismayed. “It’s really just a kick in the nuts,” a Kansas cattle rancher told the New York Times. “Come on, President Trump, this is ‘America First’ policy? No.” Importing foreign beef, they said, would just further undercut their ability to command higher prices from the Big Four.

At first, on his Truth Social account, Trump responded dismissively. “The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil,” he wrote. “It would be nice if they would understand that.” The United States Cattlemen’s Association said the White House’s efforts targeted the wrong link in the supply chain by putting pressure on cattle ranchers, instead of the Big Four.

Representative Julie Fedorchak, a Republican from North Dakota, told the New York Times her office had been flooded with calls and texts from ranchers after Trump first mentioned buying more Argentinian beef. Within days, she and seven fellow Republican representatives sent a letter to the White House relaying “strong concerns” and asking for more information about its plans.

Trump’s secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, seemed to take note. “When you have four major processors,” Rollins said, during an appearance on Fox News in late October, “you have a major issue [because] they are processing 85% of the beef in America.” Her proposed solution was what independent cattle ranchers have been advocating for years: “We have to decentralize, deregulate, invest in and incentivize smaller processors.” In November, Trump shocked everyone by announcing that he was instructing the Department of Justice to open an inquiry.

The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, responded within minutes: “Our investigation is under way!”

Soon after, the White House issued a press statement identifying the Big Four beef packers as the targets. It noted that these four companies “currently dominate” the industry and echoed Trump’s objection that two of the companies are “either foreign-owned or have significant foreign ownership and control”. The statement cited “mounting evidence” that these companies “have violated antitrust laws through coordinated pricing or capacity restrictions”. The White House promised to “root out any illegal collusion, restore fair competition and protect our food security”. (No mention was made of the justice department dropping its investigation into these very allegations weeks earlier. And, according to Bloomberg, the Big Four “have chosen not to comment on the investigation or the president’s allegations”.)

The White House declined to provide on the record responses to questions about the reporting in this article.

And though the Big Four complain that the meat margin has been reduced by rising cattle prices, their earnings remain strong. (In fact, JBS Beef North America reported record revenue of $7.2bn for the third quarter of 2025.) Meanwhile, many cattle ranchers – unable to maintain their herds with razor-thin margins – have reduced the size of their operations, pushing cattle prices slightly higher. JBS, in its quarterly earnings statement, said this was “pressuring profitability”.

Soon after, Tyson announced the closure of its Lexington plant. The move seems to mirror the decision by each of the Big Four to close plants in coordination in 2015 – and hints at more closures to come now. Just days after the Tyson announcement, Beef Magazine wrote: “Tyson went first. Now the question becomes, Who goes next?”

All of which puts Trump in a tight spot.

Since JBS’s giant donation to the inauguration in January, the company’s CEO, Joesley Batista, flew from São Paulo to personally petition Trump to lower trade tariffs on Brazilian beef (it worked). But now, deep red towns in deep red states are losing thousands of jobs, seeing cattle operations go bankrupt, and are watching their grocery bills go through the roof. (In a statement, a JBS spokesperson said: “We continue to invest in best-in-class practices, technology, and innovations that support a resilient food system and meet the expectations of our customers, partners, and the communities we serve.”)

Will Trump insist on a full investigation of the Big Four or listen to their claims of steep investments and falling profits? In an email to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Tyson said the company “continues to navigate significant headwinds in its beef business, which reported a $143m loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, following $720m in losses over the past two years, as the US cattle herd remains at historic lows”.

Back in Nebraska, Senate candidate Dan Osborn isn’t buying the need for belt-tightening. “We’re seeing big profits out of Tyson. We’re seeing executives get huge bonuses. We’re seeing all the stockholders getting paid.” The only ones suffering, he says, are Tyson line workers like Constancio Perales. “There’s people that have been there 30 years that are ready to retire, and now they’re just out. That’s not the right thing to do.”

He hopes that Trump will step in and prevent the closure in Lexington or, at least, force Tyson to sell the plant to a smaller competitor. And he hopes that the president will deliver on his promise to investigate the Big Four, in order to save cattle ranchers and small town jobs and ease food prices for working families.

In the meantime, Tyson is proceeding with its plans to close the plant in Lexington.

“For me it was a very good place to work,” Constancio said. “Yes, I get worn out and my whole body aches because I’ve been there for so many years, but I feel at home working there.” He made enough money to buy a 1,500 sq ft house just south of the Union Pacific tracks, a place to raise his kids and give them an education, so they could have better jobs than he has. “I’ve been able to provide for my family, that’s the most important thing.”

But with the plant closure, everything may be lost. And not just for him. The whole town depends on Tyson – more than half the working-age adults in the town of 10,000 are employed by the company. An impact analysis conducted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in December estimated that the closure may cost the state nearly $3.3bn in annual economic losses. María, Constancio’s wife of 32 years, works as a lunch lady in the public schools. Employees there have been told that their contracts could be cancelled because soon there may not be enough kids to keep schools open. María said she didn’t know what they would do. Constancio is months shy of getting his pension and still two years away from qualifying for Medicare.

He could apply for jobs at other Tyson packinghouses in Nebraska or Kansas, but there’s no guarantee he would get work at those plants. And he hates to think about moving away and, with everyone leaving town, his family is worried what it could get if they sold the home in Lexington where they have lived for more than a generation.

“Without his work, nothing in Lexington would be worth anything,” María said, sitting at the kitchen table while a pot bubbled on the stove. “But after almost 30 years, this house is going to be worthless, and it’ll be as if we did nothing. We don’t have any savings; this is all we have.”

On 6 December, Trump signed an executive order to create taskforces in the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price-fixing. “My administration will act to determine whether anti-competitive behavior, especially by foreign-controlled companies, increases the cost of living for Americans,” Trump wrote.

But prices continue to climb. Days after the president’s announcement, Politico published a poll of more than 2,000 Americans that showed that half of those surveyed said they find it difficult or very difficult to pay for food. A majority – 55% – blamed the Trump administration for the high prices.

Osborn warns that Trump is especially at risk of further alienating voters in rural areas, where grocery prices are often as much as 25% higher than in urban areas – due to lack of competition and reliance on dollar stores and chains like Walmart.

“This is rural America,” Osborn says. “This is his base that essentially he’s – for a lack of a better term – fucking over.”