Costco‘s $4.99 rotisserie chicken is an American icon — the promise of quality at scale. But two class action lawsuits in two months are cracking that image, and San Diego is ground zero for one of them.
In January, two consumers filed suit in San Diego federal court alleging that Costco’s “no preservatives” labeling is false, that the chicken contains sodium phosphate and carrageenan, additives that function as exactly that. Then in mid-February, a second lawsuit cited research by Farm Forward, a nonprofit I founded, showing that Costco’s own Nebraska poultry plant failed federal salmonella safety standards nearly every month for years. Together, the picture is damning.
I come at this from two directions. As a professor at the University of San Diego, I study the ethical, environmental and cultural dimensions of how we produce and consume food. As founder of Farm Forward, I’ve watched the organization spend years investigating the practices the industry doesn’t want consumers to see.
What Farm Forward’s analysis of USDA inspection data revealed about Costco is alarming precisely because Costco controls its entire supply chain, from the barns to the shelf. No other retailer has more power to get chicken right. And it still can’t.
The numbers are stark. According to recent data, Costco’s Lincoln Premium Poultry plant in Fremont, Nebraska, a $450 million facility the company built from scratch to guarantee control and quality, has routinely received the worst possible USDA salmonella rating. This is what led the Seattle lawsuit to describe Costco’s contamination problem as “chronic, uncontrolled and unresolved.”
If you routinely pick up a couple of packages of chicken breasts during your weekly Costco run, the likelihood is high that you’re bringing home salmonella every month. And because the USDA lacks the authority to order recalls or shut down plants over salmonella, Costco faces no enforceable consequences. It could voluntarily pull contaminated products, but it doesn’t.
The model itself is broken. Over 100 million chickens a year pass through this single plant, birds genetically modified to grow so fast their legs buckle beneath them, crammed into ammonia-filled barns, standing in their own waste. A 2021 undercover investigation documented birds collapsing under their own weight, developing painful sores and burns, and unable to reach food or water.
Costco’s response was to call the footage “normal and uneventful activity.” In 2022, two thousand chickens froze to death in trailers on their way to the plant. A thousand more perished in a truck fire. Costco reports losing approximately 7.2 million chickens a year before they even reach slaughter, losses the industry treats as a cost of doing business.
These aren’t conditions that occasionally produce contamination, they’re engineered to do so. As economist W. Edwards Deming, put it, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.” Costco’s plant and practices result in overcrowded, stressed birds with compromised immune systems, creating the perfect breeding ground for pathogens.
Research now clearly establishes that poor animal welfare heightens the risk of foodborne illness. The USDA itself has acknowledged this connection. Yet when shareholders filed suit in 2022 demanding that Costco ensure its birds had basic access to food and water, the board rejected the demand. When Nebraska legislators introduced a bill requiring stronger biosecurity and disease mitigation at poultry operations, Costco testified against it.
The harms extend beyond the birds and the consumers who eat them. Costco’s farmers, recruited with promises of good terms, are locked into fifteen-year contracts requiring them to take on millions of dollars in loans to build high-capacity barns, then trapped in financial dependency that forces them to prioritize production quotas over animal care. Workers inside the plant face documented chemical, electrical and respiratory hazards. And the waste from these operations pollutes local waterways, with recent research connecting agricultural runoff to elevated pediatric cancer rates in Nebraska.
There’s no mystery about what better looks like. The Norwegian retailer REMA 1000, which also owns their own chicken operation, transitioned to slower-growing breeds and improved slaughter practices. Costco, with its unmatched supply chain control, could do the same tomorrow. It chooses not to.
San Diegans deserve better. These lawsuits are symptoms, not solutions. It’s past time the industry, and the federal government, started asking what it would take to build food systems that don’t rely on misleading consumers, compromising their safety, or accepting cruelty as a business model.
Aaron S. Gross is a professor at the University of San Diego, where he directs the Center for Food Systems Transformation, and the founder of Farm Forward.
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