Video and Transcript for The Secret Scam Driving Up Food Prices
The price of everything has increased, food and beverage is a leading category. Our guest helped unseal a key reason why. And there's a good chance it's an unlawful scheme.
Below you can find a YouTube post of the recording for Episode #61, The Secret Scam Driving Up Food Prices.
Stacy Mitchell, the co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, is our guest this week. For decades her work at ILSR has helped communities and local businesses thrive in an increasingly hostile corporate dominated environment. Last May, after the new administration’s FTC dropped a case against Pepsi, the ILSR moved to unseal the case documents, and this past December they won. In this episode we find out what was in those files, and how the pricing scheme they reveal ripples across all categories of the consumer economy.
This is not as heavily edited as the podcast, it’s closer to the raw video of our taping session. We also have a rough transcript for you.
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Unsealing the Pepsi case files is huge. The fact that pricing discrimination schemes operate across multiple consumer categories means this isnt just about soda, its about how dominant suppliers leverage market power systemically. I worked adjacent to retail procurement years back, and the differntial pricing between small grocers and big chains was staggering but rarely documented. This kind of transparency makes enforcement actually possibe.