Opinion: San Diego at Center of Legal Fight over Costco's Rotisserie Chicken

Media
12 hours ago
2 min read

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.

Aaron S. Gross, a professor at the University of San Diego, where he directs the Center for Food Systems Transformation, and founder of Farm Forward, breaks down the lawsuits in an opinion piece for Times of San Diego.

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.