Naming and Shaming Food Barons: A Q&A with Austin Frerick

Growing up in Northern California, Peet’s was always treated as a local coffee shop. The first location of the chain founded in 1966 was just a 15-minute train ride from my childhood home in the East Bay. Yes, Peet’s had locations across the United States, but it still felt like an alternative to the corporate behemoth of Starbucks. 

That changed in 2012 when Peet’s was acquired by JAB Holding Company, a secretive firm based in Luxembourg. Peet’s wasn’t the only locally-loved chain integrated into what is now a global empire that sells more coffee than Starbucks. 

In the last few decades, JAB has spent billions acquiring Caribou Coffee, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Noah’s New York Bagels and more. It also now supplies beans to independent coffee chains like La Colombe, Stumptown, and Green Mountain.

The corporate consolidation of coffee has been mirrored across the American food industry. Here are just a few statistics compiled in Austin Frerick’s book Barons: two companies sell 74 percent of all milk, four beef-slaughtering firms control 85 percent of the industry, and one firm handles over 25 percent of the world’s grain trade.

Frerick makes this staggering corporate consolidation digestible by telling the stories of eight barons dominating distinct parts of our shared food industry from hog farms, to berry production, to food distribution.

These monopolies have been bad news for American families, Frerick argues, raising food prices, lowering quality, and leaving a trail of environmental destruction in their wake.

Inequality.org spoke with Frerick about how this corporate consolidation came to pass and what we can do to revitalize family-owned farming. Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry is now available in paperback from Island Press.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to start researching and writing about consolidation in the food industry?

A lot of this goes back to my time at the Treasury Department, where I worked in the tax analysis office until 2017. While there, I co-wrote an academic article for the National Tax Journal that explored the growth of monopoly profits in the corporate tax base. Looking at the different industries, it’s one thing to see them in pharmaceuticals — that’s kind of the deal: you do research, you get monopoly profits for a few years — but I didn’t understand it showing up in food and agriculture.

This was at the same time that I was grappling with the 2016 moment in America as someone who had supported Bernie Sanders. I had a lot of Trump supporting family members and was realizing that a lot of people didn’t understand what was going on in this country. I also stumbled on an article about chicken monopolies written by a journalist who was in law school — that was Lina Khan — which got me on the antitrust bandwagon. It really explained a lot of what I had seen in my lifetime. 

That’s the intellectual genesis. This whole book started from an article in Vox on the hog barons. I teamed up with my buddy Charlie Hope-D’Anieri to write it because I was intellectually curious. He’s more of a journalist, I’m more of a researcher. The process helped me realize that people need narrative, a story, beyond the evidence to understand these things. So I started to think about how you tell this deregulatory story through a punchy narrative, and that’s how the book came about.

This book covers barons across very different parts of the food industry. What are the common threads that link them?

A common thread I’ve seen is that they’re willing to cross ethical lines that most people are not willing to cross. Most people aren’t willing to treat workers, animals, and the land in this way. We live in a moment that rewards the worst actors, it’s a race to the bottom. That’s what neoliberalism is to me. All these dark things we did in the past that we kind of fixed or dealt with are coming back and showing their ugly heads. 

Are there particular examples of that tendency that you’d point to?

I go back to the dairy barons. Visiting farms, it’s clear that dairy farmers have a special relationship with their animals — they see them twice a day, they really know their personalities. Most of those kinds of dairy farmers weren’t willing to adopt the industrial production model because they saw the cruel things it did to the animals. It just feels wrong to put a cow in a metal shed and have it stand on concrete all day. 

One thing that struck me reading this book is how a lot of these monopolies got off the ground around the same time. What are the regulatory and economic conditions that have enabled these giants to get rolling?

Since the 1980s we’ve been living in a Second Gilded Age where, as these firms amass power, they have been able to corrupt the system more and more to pad their bottom line. I think it says so much that Trump’s largest inauguration donor was my slaughter baron, JBS. 

READ: How Corporate Consolidation Broke America’s Grocery System

I should also say that I’ve been thinking a lot about how much we failed in 2008. This whole era could have ended at that moment, but we didn’t do structural remedies. We didn’t actually rein in power. We didn’t confront power, so everything just got worse.

What are the top-line policies that the government could adopt to start addressing consolidation?

That’s what I’m focusing on in my next book. I think no one is articulating a positive vision of the food system, which is needed so that people can rush through the gates. The solution to me is about confronting power.  

What I find really interesting, and what I think is actually underappreciated in U.S. history, is how much of the New Deal actually started at the local level. Like, a lot of the New Deal came from Wisconsin. So I’m looking at what are the cool things being done right now locally in America, but also internationally, that we can just copy. What are cool programs out there we can scale? 

Are there any you’ve seen that make sense for the federal government to adopt in that vein?

My favorite has to do with Kerrygold butter. People love Kerrygold butter, the Irish butter in the gold wrapper. It’s now the number two butter in America. And what we can take from them is the importance of putting animals back on the land. It’s one of the best things we can do to revitalize and stabilize rural America. That part of the country thrived when there was a thriving middle-class family farm system.

I want us to transition away from industrial metal sheds and put animals back on farms. I use Kerrygold as an example because the only difference between American butter and Irish butter is what we feed the cows. Most American butter is coming from Bakersfield, California, where cows feed on ethanol byproduct on dirt lots next to oil rigs. Because they’re eating corn, the butter they produce is fibrous, they’re not eating grass so it’s white and doesn’t spread well. It also doesn’t taste good. I love this example because it really reinforces the point that a lot of these reforms are practical and proven. Like, that’s what butter used to be for my grandparents.

I appreciated that framing throughout this book, that while not everything was perfect — you acknowledge indigenous land theft — a lot of the solution here looks like returning to the farming system that we used to have. 

I think it’s really easy to dismiss all old policies as bad, but there are nuances to history. With the food system, we did make a lot of progress. I think the best example here is meat packing workers. We made policy choices as a society at the turn of the century, after what we saw in The Jungle and other investigations into the cruelty of that industry, that took a low wage job and elevated it to a solid middle-class living. What we’ve seen essentially from the onset of the Reagan era is a systematic assault on that profession, reverting it to its low wage origins. History shows us that we can make different choices.

What does corporations buying up all these parts of the food supply chain mean for American families? How does it affect how much money they’re spending on food and the quality of that food?

It simply means they’re paying more for lower quality food. To me the best silver lining for hope here is that everyone is seeing that the system does not work. There’s even the cliche of the yuppie that lives in Manhattan who visits Europe and comes back saying that the food just tastes better and is cheaper. A thing I didn’t expect is how strong of opinions older Americans have about how bad tasting food is now.  

My first few times talking about this book I could see people agreeing with me but then in the back of their minds thinking I was asking them to pay more for their food. So now one of the first things I show — and this is something I added in the paperback version — is how much more the average American spends on groceries than their western peers. And that’s not just because we’re not subsidizing good food but also because these concentrated markets price gouge. I want people to understand that they’re paying more for lower quality things.

This article was originally published at Inequality.org, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. It is reprinted here via Creative Commons 3.0.