The story of how french fries got to be ridiculously expensive starts really small, before making you scratch your head about the way the whole world works.
Can anyone stop the french fry cartel?
The anti-trust battle between diners and Big French Fry, briefly explained.
Peter Cade/Getty Images
Peter Balonon-Rosen is a producer for Vox’s Today, Explained where he’s drawn to covering stories about inequality, culture, and policy. Prior to Vox, he covered topics ranging from minor league baseball to the Supreme Court to Finland’s heavy metal scene while working at NPR, Marketplace, Indiana Public Broadcasting, and WBUR.
The short version is that there’s possibly an algorithm-driven conspiracy in which a literal potato cartel has been colluding to raise the price of all of our french fries.
The long version goes like this: Plaintiffs have alleged in a set of lawsuits that the largest potato product manufacturers in the country — the four that have cornered nearly the entire frozen potato market — all put their sensitive market data into the same third-party software, which uses that aggregate data to spit out recommendations about how they should price their products. And that software has essentially been giving each company the same recommendations.
If the CEOs of these four companies got in a room, and while they were all chomping on cigars, said, “Hey, let’s all set the price of our french fries at the exact same amount,” that would be illegal. What’s allegedly happening is these companies are using this software in the same way they’d use that room. And there are plenty of people out there — including people in the US government — who say that’s illegal. The question is whether they’re right.
And it turns out the business practice at the heart of this case is happening all over the place.
There have been big lawsuits and government investigations into how this is happening with our rent. Many landlords use a third-party app called RealPage, which takes landlord data and recommends rents. And renters have seen an increase in rental prices as a result. Meatpackers are doing a similar thing, as are hotels.
Congressional legislation has been introduced to tackle some of this stuff head-on. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) co-sponsored a bill in 2024 that tried to combat landlords using third-party rental software to set prices. Recently, she introduced legislation that specifically targets algorithmic pricing practices.
Those bills aren’t yet law and have a lot of congressional hurdles to overcome. In the meantime, there are class action lawsuits going on around this. In the event that they do come to some resolution, maybe you’ll see a notification along the lines of, “Have you paid too much for french fries? You may be owed money,” and you’ll get 92 cents in the mail. And then you can go buy, maybe, a quarter of a french fry.
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