Court Grants Complete Dismissal of Antitrust Multidistrict Litigation Against Louis Dreyfus Company

On October 15, 2025, the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota granted Cravath client Louis Dreyfus Company LLC’s (“LDC”) motion to dismiss more than fifty lawsuits in consolidated antitrust litigation alleging a nationwide conspiracy to fix sugar prices.

Plaintiffs, which included Direct Purchasers, Commercial Indirect Purchasers and Consumer Indirect Purchasers of granulated sugar from across the country, filed actions against large producers and sellers of granulated sugar, including LDC, which the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation transferred to the District of Minnesota for coordinated pretrial proceedings. Plaintiffs alleged that the Defendants conspired to artificially inflate the price of refined sugar in the United States by sharing competitively sensitive information with each other. Plaintiffs claimed that these allegations constitute anticompetitive concerted activity in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act and parallel state law statutes. LDC and the other Defendants denied Plaintiffs’ allegations and claims and moved to dismiss.

The Court agreed with LDC’s argument that there were no plausible allegations suggesting that LDC had agreed to coordinate sugar prices or share information with its competitors. The Court therefore granted dismissal of all claims against LDC, holding that Plaintiffs’ allegations against LDC “lack facts showing reciprocal exchanges of pricing information or coordinated price movements” and that “Plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged parallel conduct involving Louis Dreyfus.”

The Cravath team is led by partner Michael P. Addis and includes associates Scott B. Cohen and Jacob B. Seeley. Paul Feingold, Henry Merschat and Ruby Vesey also worked on this matter.

The case is In re Granulated Sugar Antitrust Litigation, No. 24-md-3110 (D. Minn.)