Latest Competition Progress at USDA Highly Informed by Open Markets Scholarship

Fair Access to Retail Markets is Essential to a More Competitive, Diverse Food System 

MINNEAPOLIS – Open Markets Institute Food Program Manager Claire Kelloway released the following statement on the USDA’s latest actions to improve fair competition in food and agriculture and particularly in meatpacking. 

“USDA has invested billions to support new meatpacking plants, but if these upstarts are to succeed and scale, they need to be able to compete on the merits and fairly access retail markets. Today, USDA released a critical interim report exposing all the anticompetitive and exclusionary tactics that new packers are up against: slotting fees, opaque accrual fees, category captains, and kickbacks,” says Claire Kelloway, food program manager at the Open Markets Institute.  

“This report is a crucial first step to better understand the tricks and cheats that packers and retailers use to lock out the competition. It’s encouraging that USDA plans to use its subpoena authority to bring more sunlight to these tactics and explore more enforcement action and regulation against unfair meat merchandising.”  

The Open Markets Institute has long advocated for fair rules in retail. In 2020, we led a petition to the Federal Trade Commission to ban exclusive dealing by dominant firms. We’re honored that over 30 organizations, including 16 food and farm groups, joined our petition.  

In 2022 we presented research on the exclusionary harms of slotting fees, category captain arrangements, and volume-based rebates at the Yale Law School’s “Reforming America’s Food Retail Markets” conference. This research was later published in the Yale Law and Policy Review.  

Open Markets has also long sounded the alarm on price discrimination and the need to enforce the Robinson-Patman Act in law review articles and magazine features. 

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