Published
September 15, 2026
U.S. businesses that bought fresh or frozen, uncooked turkey directly from Butterball, Hormel's Jennie-O Turkey Store or the other major turkey processors between January 1, 2010 and January 1, 2017 may qualify to claim a pro rata share of $71.5 million in new turkey price-fixing class action settlements. The notice program for those settlements begins September 15, 2026 and the deadline to file is October 30, 2026; the claim form for this round had not yet posted on the official settlement website at publication.
Current Status
A claim window is opening, but it is not live yet. The court preliminarily approved two settlements in In re Turkey Antitrust Litigation on August 26, 2026 — $34 million from Butterball and $37.5 million from Hormel Foods and its Jennie-O Turkey Store business, $71.5 million together — and set the notice program to begin September 15, 2026, with October 30, 2026 as the deadline to file a claim, ask to be excluded or object. No timezone has been reported for that cutoff. A final approval hearing is set for November 24, 2026 before Judge Sunil R. Harjani in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The court has not ruled on final approval and no payment date has been announced.As of publication the official direct purchaser settlement website still displayed the earlier Cargill and Tyson round, whose claim, exclusion and objection deadlines all passed on April 21, 2025. Direct purchasers watching for the Butterball and Hormel claim form should check the site again rather than reading the closed Cargill page as the current state of the case — the same website carries every round, one after another.
This is a direct purchaser class, not a consumer class. It covers the businesses that bought turkey straight from the processors — wholesalers, distributors and large retailers — rather than shoppers who bought a bird at a supermarket.
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Status
Claims Opening
Notice program begins September 15, 2026 · the claim form for this round was not yet posted at publication
Claim Deadline
October 30, 2026
Also the exclusion and objection deadline · no timezone stated
Estimated Payout
Pro rata share of $71.5M
Scaled to each buyer's direct turkey purchases · part of roughly $130.7M recovered for the class
Proof Required
Yes
Business purchase records · invoices or receipts naming the seller, date and net amount
What Changed Recently?
Butterball agreed to pay $34 million to the certified direct purchaser class, the last of the turkey processors to settle with that class. Judge Harjani granted preliminary approval to that agreement and to Hormel's $37.5 million settlement on August 26, 2026, and the trial that had been scheduled in the case was taken off the calendar. With the two agreements in place, total recoveries for the direct purchaser class come to roughly $130.7 million, of which about $96.7 million comes from settlements reached earlier in the case.Those earlier agreements were reached one defendant at a time over several years: Cargill at $32.5 million, Prestage Farms at $15 million, House of Raeford Farms at $3.7 million, a combined $3.375 million from Cooper Farms and Farbest Foods that was preliminarily approved in April 2025, and settlements with Foster Farms, Perdue and Tyson. Agri Stats, the data company at the center of the case, settled in March 2026 in this litigation alongside parallel settlements in the broiler chicken and pork cases, with conduct terms restricting the kind of information sharing the complaints describe.
Every settling defendant denies the allegations and denies any liability or wrongdoing. The settlements were reached to end the cost and risk of continued litigation, without any admission, and no court has found that any defendant violated the antitrust laws.
Who Qualifies?
The settlement class in this track is all persons who purchased turkey directly from any of the defendants or any co-conspirator, or their subsidiaries or affiliates, for use or delivery in the United States from at least as early as January 1, 2010 until January 1, 2017. The certified litigation class was built around fresh or frozen, uncooked turkey breast, ground turkey and whole bird turkey products, and each settlement agreement carries its own full definition of "turkey" — worth reading before assuming a processed or cooked product counts."Directly" is the word that decides most eligibility questions. A grocery wholesaler that bought truckloads of whole birds from a processor is a direct purchaser. A supermarket chain that bought from a processor rather than through a distributor is a direct purchaser. A household that bought a Thanksgiving turkey at that supermarket is not — that purchase went through a retailer, which makes it indirect, and indirect purchases are not part of this class.
The processors named as defendants over the life of the case are Butterball; Cargill and Cargill Meat Solutions; Cooper Farms; Farbest Foods; Foster Farms and Foster Poultry Farms; Hormel Foods and Jennie-O Turkey Store; House of Raeford Farms; Perdue Farms and Perdue Foods; Prestage Farms; and Tyson Foods together with Tyson Fresh Meats, Tyson Prepared Foods and The Hillshire Brands Company. Agri Stats, Inc. is also a defendant. Kraft Heinz Foods Company and Kraft Foods Group Brands were dismissed from the case in 2020.
The usual antitrust class exclusions apply: the defendants and their officers, directors, employees and controlled affiliates; the alleged co-conspirators; federal, state and local government entities; the judicial officers presiding over the case, their immediate families and staff; and any class member that validly excludes itself by the deadline.
There Is a Second Turkey Class — Commercial and Institutional Buyers
The same litigation carries a separate track for indirect purchasers that buy turkey for their own use in commercial food preparation — restaurants, caterers, cafeterias, hospitals, schools and similar institutional kitchens that bought through a distributor rather than from a processor. The court certified a class of all entities in the indirect purchaser states that indirectly purchased fresh or frozen, uncooked turkey breast, ground turkey or whole bird turkey products sold by the defendants in the United States from January 1, 2010 through December 31, 2016, for their own use in commercial food preparation.That class has its own settlements, its own notices, its own deadlines and its own website, Turkey Commercial Case.com. Settlements with Perdue and Foster Farms, and a separate one with Agri Stats, have received preliminary approval on that side of the case. A business that bought turkey through a broadline distributor for its kitchen belongs on that site, not on the direct purchaser one.
Neither track reaches household grocery shoppers. There is no consumer claim to file in this case.
How Much Can You Get?
Payments are pro rata, scaled to the dollar value of each class member's qualifying direct purchases of turkey during the class period. A buyer that accounted for a large share of the class's total purchases receives a correspondingly large share of the distribution; a small buyer receives a small one. No per-claimant figure has been published, and none can be estimated responsibly until the administrator knows how much of the class files.The two current settlements put $71,500,000 into the class's recovery — $34,000,000 from Butterball and $37,500,000 from Hormel and Jennie-O. Court-awarded attorneys' fees, litigation expenses, the cost of notice and administration and any service awards come out of the funds before class members are paid, and the court decides those amounts at or after the final approval hearing. It can award less than is requested.
Because the case has settled in stages, a company that bought from several processors over the seven-year class period can have a stake in more than one settlement fund. That is the practical reason to check purchase records against the whole defendant list rather than only the two names in the current notice.
What Proof or Notice ID Is Required?
Proof is required. The direct purchaser claim process is built on transaction data the defendants produced from their own sales records, so much of the work is confirming or correcting the purchase totals the administrator already attributes to your company. Where a class member disputes those totals or wants to add purchases, the claim form calls for supporting documentation: actual receipts or invoices showing the product, the defendant or alleged co-conspirator that sold the turkey, the date of purchase and the net purchase amount.Legible copies are what get submitted. Originals stay in the company's own records. Because the class period ended in January 2017, pulling documentation means going back through archived accounts-payable records, which is the single most time-consuming part of filing and the reason not to leave this to the last week.
This is a business claim, not a consumer one, and there is no receipts-optional tier. A company with no records of buying turkey directly from a defendant has nothing to attest to.
What Is the Deadline?
Claims under the Butterball and Hormel settlements are due October 30, 2026. The same date is the deadline to exclude your company from the settlement class and the deadline to object. No timezone has been reported for the cutoff, so treat the date itself as the deadline rather than counting on a late-day grace period, and check the official settlement website for the postmark rule if you are mailing a claim form rather than filing online.Excluding your company preserves whatever right it has to sue these defendants separately over the same claims, and gives up every benefit of the settlements. Objecting is open only to class members that stay in, and a class member can object and still file a claim.
Earlier settlements in this case ran their own claim windows, and those have closed.
The Earlier Cargill and Tyson Round Has Closed
The round before this one covered Cargill's $32,500,000 settlement together with the earlier Tyson settlement, and a single claim form covered both. Its claim, exclusion and objection deadlines all fell on April 21, 2025, and the fairness hearing on that round was held June 18, 2025. All of those dates have passed and the official settlement website marks each of them closed.That matters for two reasons. A direct purchaser landing on the settlement website today may still see the Cargill page and conclude there is nothing left to do — which would be the wrong read, because the Butterball and Hormel round is the live one. And a company that missed the April 2025 window cannot claim against the Cargill or Tyson funds now; its remaining stake is in the settlements still going through notice and approval.
How Do You Take Action?
Direct purchaser claims are handled through the official settlement website, Turkey Litigation.com, run by the court-appointed administrator, A.B. Data, Ltd. The site hosts the notices, the claim form, the settlement agreements and the court orders for each settlement in the direct purchaser track, one round at a time. At publication it was still showing the closed Cargill round, so the practical step right now is to check back for the Butterball and Hormel notice and claim form and to start pulling purchase records in the meantime.Filing means identifying the purchasing entity, reviewing the purchase data the administrator has for it, and either accepting those figures or submitting the invoices and receipts that support a different number. A company that bought under more than one legal name, or that has since been acquired or merged, should say so on the claim form rather than filing twice, since a corporate family's purchases are generally claimed together.
Commercial and institutional buyers that purchased indirectly file on Turkey Commercial Case.com instead, under that class's own deadlines.
What the Case Alleges
The complaint that opened this litigation in December 2019 alleges that the turkey processors agreed to exchange detailed, current and forward-looking information about their production and sales through Agri Stats, a subscription service that collected data from the processors, standardized it and returned monthly reports comparing each participant to the rest of the industry. The plaintiffs allege the reports were not the kind of aggregated public benchmark other industries use, but plant-level detail that competitors could decode, available only to processors that contributed their own data and never to the buyers on the other side of the market.The alleged effect was a restraint on supply and an increase in price: the complaint points to industry-wide production cuts, wholesale turkey prices that rose out of line with feed costs beginning around 2009 and 2010, and prices that fell back toward feed costs after the broiler chicken litigation was filed in late 2016. The plaintiffs brought the case under Section 1 of the Sherman Act.
In October 2020 the court largely allowed the case to proceed but narrowed it, holding that the plaintiffs had adequately alleged a Sherman Act violation only under a rule of reason analysis rather than a per se theory. It granted the Kraft defendants' motion to dismiss and denied the motions filed by Farbest and Cooper Farms. These remain allegations. The defendants deny them, no court has decided the merits, and the settlements resolve the claims without any admission of wrongdoing.
The turkey case is one of three parallel antitrust actions built around the same data service. OCA's coverage of the broiler chicken side includes the Agri Stats chicken price-fixing settlement update and the chicken price-fixing settlement payments page, and the pork side is covered on the pork price-fixing settlement page.
What Happens Next?
The next milestone is the final approval hearing on November 24, 2026, where the court will consider whether the Butterball and Hormel settlements are fair, reasonable and adequate and will take up the requests for attorneys' fees, expenses and service awards. Class counsel is expected to file the motion for final approval by November 10, 2026. Timely objections are heard there.Payments follow only if the court grants final approval and that approval becomes final, which takes longer if anyone appeals. No distribution date has been announced for these settlements. Hearing dates in this case have moved before, so a class member planning to attend should confirm the date on the settlement website first.
Sources and Verification
This page draws on the official direct purchaser settlement website, Turkey Litigation.com, and the commercial and institutional indirect purchaser website, Turkey Commercial Case.com, both administered by A.B. Data, Ltd.; on the public docket in In re Turkey Antitrust Litigation, No. 1:19-cv-08318, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, including the class action complaint filed December 19, 2019 and the October 19, 2020 memorandum opinion on the motions to dismiss; and on trade and legal press reporting of the August 26, 2026 preliminary approval order, including MEAT+POULTRY and Feedstuffs. Settlement amounts, deadlines and the class definition should be confirmed against the notice and claim form on the official settlement website before filing.For a closely comparable business-to-business antitrust claim window open right now, see OCA's page on the diisocyanates (MDI and TDI) price-fixing settlements.
Questions
Can I file a claim if I bought turkey at the grocery store?
No. This settlement class covers direct purchasers only — the businesses and entities that bought turkey straight from a turkey processor or an alleged co-conspirator, such as grocery wholesalers, distributors and large retailers. A household that bought a turkey at a supermarket bought it indirectly, from the retailer, and is not part of the direct purchaser class. There is a separate track in the same case for commercial and institutional buyers that purchased indirectly for use in commercial food preparation, which has its own website and its own notices.
What counts as turkey for purposes of the class?
The certified direct purchaser class is built around fresh or frozen, uncooked turkey breast, ground turkey and whole bird turkey products bought directly from the defendants in the United States during the class period. Cooked and further-processed turkey items such as deli meat are not what the certified class was defined around, so a buyer whose purchases were only of processed products should check its purchase records against the notice before assuming it qualifies.
Do I need invoices to file?
Yes, if you are disputing or adding to the purchase totals the administrator already has. The claim process starts from transaction data the defendants produced, and supporting documentation has to be actual receipts or invoices showing the product, the defendant or co-conspirator that sold it to you, the date of purchase and the net purchase amount. Legible copies are submitted and originals are kept in your own records.
I already filed a claim in an earlier round. Do I have to file again?
Do not assume an earlier claim carries forward. This case has settled in rounds, each with its own claim window: the Cargill and Tyson round closed April 21, 2025, and the current notice covers the Butterball and Hormel agreements with an October 30, 2026 deadline. Open the official settlement website, read what the current notice says about previously filed claims, and file again for this round if there is any doubt.
How much will a claim actually pay?
No per-claimant estimate has been published. Payments are pro rata, scaled to each class member's qualifying direct purchases of turkey during the class period, out of what is left of the funds after court-awarded attorneys' fees, litigation expenses, notice and administration costs and any service awards. A buyer with a large share of the class's total purchases receives a correspondingly large share of the distribution.
Has anyone been found guilty of fixing turkey prices?
No. These are settlements of civil antitrust claims, not findings of liability. The defendants deny the allegations and deny any wrongdoing, and they settled to end the cost and risk of continued litigation without admitting anything. The court also narrowed the case early on, ruling in October 2020 that the plaintiffs had adequately alleged a Sherman Act claim only under a rule of reason analysis rather than a per se theory.
For more class actions keep scrolling below.
Settlement Amount
$71,500,000
Butterball $34M · Hormel and Jennie-O $37.5M · roughly $130.7M recovered for the direct purchaser class in total
Case Title
In re Turkey Antitrust Litigation
Case Number
1:19-cv-08318
Court
U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois
Final Approval Hearing
November 24, 2026
Before Judge Sunil R. Harjani · date subject to change
Administrator
A.B. Data, Ltd.
Official Website
Turkey Litigation.com
