General Mills, Mars and McKee Foods Sue US Sugar Producers Over Alleged Price-Fixing, Days After Similar Claims Were Dismissed

General Mills, Mars and McKee Foods Sue US Sugar Producers Over Alleged Price-Fixing, Nearly a Year After Similar Claims Were Dismissed

General Mills, Mars Inc. and McKee Foods Corp. filed a lawsuit in Chicago federal court on September 4 accusing two of the country's largest sugar producers of illegally coordinating on price, according to Bloomberg and Transport Topics, which both cited the same reporting.

The suit targets American Sugar Refining Inc. and United Sugar Producers & Refiners, companies the plaintiffs describe as vertically integrated and controlling the bulk of U.S. sugar refining. The core allegation: the two producers fed "competitively sensitive" pricing and sales data to Commodity Information Inc., an independent market analyst, which then republished that data to subscribers across the sugar industry, according to the complaint reported by Bloomberg and Transport Topics.

The plaintiffs claim this created "a shared, real-time understanding of each other's pricing, sold positions and forward strategies," amplifying price effects that were already inflated by U.S. import restrictions on sugar, per Transport Topics.

Not the First Time

This is not a new legal theory. A broader class action covering the same core allegation, led by KPH Healthcare Services, was filed in March 2024 and consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, according to Gokhshtein Research.

In October 2025, that Minnesota court dismissed several defendants from the consolidated case, ruling that plaintiffs lacked sufficient evidence of an explicit price-fixing agreement and that merely sharing pricing information does not, by itself, violate the Sherman Act, Gokhshtein Research reported.

That ruling did not end the fight. On July 24, 2026, a fresh federal class action landed in the same Minnesota court, this one brought by Frito-Lay, Grupo Bimbo, General Mills, Mars, Nestlé USA, Hershey, Kraft Heinz and Mondelēz, naming a wider set of defendants including ASR Group International, Domino Foods, United Sugars Corp., US Sugar, Michigan Sugar Co. and Louis Dreyfus LLC, according to Gokhshtein Research. That complaint alleges price-fixing dating back to January 1, 2019, and specifically tries to clear the evidentiary bar the October dismissal set by presenting direct evidence of coordination rather than leaning solely on information-sharing patterns.

The Company's Defense

Marianne Martinez, a spokeswoman for American Sugar Refining and ASR Group, has pushed back hard on both fronts. On the September 4 Chicago filing, Martinez told Transport Topics the suit "repackages the same baseless allegations that have been pending for approximately two years," characterizing it as "additional plaintiffs' lawyers peeling away parties who were already represented in the pending litigation." She said "the facts don't support their allegations, and we will demonstrate that as we defend this case."

Martinez offered nearly identical language to Gokhshtein Research regarding the July 24 Minnesota complaint: "The facts don't support their claims, and we will absolutely prove that as we defend this case." Other named defendants did not comment to Gokhshtein Research by press time.

The companies' defense matters because a federal judge already found, in October 2025, that shared pricing data alone isn't enough to prove an illegal agreement. The new complaints will need to clear that same bar with something more concrete than parallel behavior.

A Different Result in Eggs

While the sugar case grinds through motions and re-filings, a separate food-industry price-fixing case already produced concrete consequences. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust suit on June 29, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa against Cal-Maine Foods, Versova/Centrum and Hickman's Family Farm, alleging the egg producers conspired to manipulate a daily benchmark price index published by Urner Barry, according to the Epoch Times.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said the bipartisan, 17-state investigation found the companies coordinated bids from June 2022 to March 2025 to push that index higher, and cited a December 2022 email in which Hickman's CEO urged rivals to submit "strong bids, early and often." The companies settled June 30, agreeing to donate more than 53 million eggs nationally and pay states a combined $3.3 million, the Epoch Times reported. The first delivery, 183,600 eggs, reached the Yuma Community Food Bank in Arizona on August 17.

The egg case shows regulators and states can win these disputes when they have direct evidence, like an executive's own email, rather than just parallel pricing patterns. That is precisely the higher bar the sugar plaintiffs now have to clear after their claims were tossed once already.

U.S. sugar prices are also propped up by long-standing federal policy restricting sugar imports, a point Transport Topics flagged. This has nothing to do with whether producers colluded. Even if the collusion claims fail again, American consumers and food manufacturers will keep paying a premium for sugar because of that quota system, a separate policy fight entirely from the antitrust litigation working through the Chicago and Minnesota courts.

Both sugar cases remain in early stages, with no trial dates set and no rulings yet on the merits of the new evidence the plaintiffs say they now have.