Frozen potato producers are the target of multiple new federal lawsuits alleging that companies have been coordinating their prices through third-party data providers to form a “potato cartel.”

Companies including Cavendish Farms, McCain Foods, JRS, and Lamb Weston, as well as the National Potato Promotion Board, conspired “to raise, stabilize, fix [or] otherwise manipulate the prices in the market for the frozen potatoes in the United States,” according to one of the lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois.

The four large potato processors had effectively formed a cartel, thereby breaking U.S. antitrust law, by having “the same access to each other’s data on pricing and other sensitive information, as well as with a direct line of........

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