Costco Wholesale Corporation

Costco is one of the world's largest meat retailers. Its Fresh Foods segment generated $38B in FY2025 (~14% of $275B total revenue), encompassing meat, produce, deli, and bakery. The company sold 157.4 million rotisserie chickens in FY2025 — over 431,000 per day — at the famous $4.99 loss-leader price. To secure supply, Costco invested $450M in Lincoln Premium Poultry (LPP), a vertically integrated poultry complex in Fremont, Nebraska, that raises, slaughters, and processes 100M+ chickens per year across ~520 barns operated by 100 contract grower families. LPP supplies ~40% of Costco's western U.S. rotisserie demand. Under USDA salmonella testing, the Fremont plant received the worst Category 3 rating 92% of the time since opening and 100% of the time from September 2023 through July 2025. A 2021 Mercy For Animals undercover investigation at a Nebraska supplier documented chickens unable to support their own weight, open wounds, ammonia burns, broken bones, and twisted necks — LPP called it "normal and uneventful livestock activity." A 2022 shareholder derivative lawsuit (Smith v. Vachris) cited a January 2020 incident where 30,500 chickens were denied food and water for 24+ hours, killing 1,622. While meat is a minority of Costco's diversified retail revenue, the company's deliberate vertical integration into industrial poultry slaughter at massive scale makes this exclusion clear-cut.