Vitamin Giants: The Sequel

For years in Madera County in the valley north of Fresno, John Peters turned vitamins and minerals into formulas that farmers blended into feed grain and fed to their chickens, hogs and cattle. Such nutritional additives mean quicker-growing animals and more profits for farmers. While it used to take chickens nine weeks to reach broiler size, now they gorge themselves on vitamin-enriched feed and in just six weeks are ready to leap onto global dinner plates.

But Peters said that his vitamin premix business is now in trouble. The chicken side is being gobbled up by vitamin makers Hoffmann-La Roche of Switzerland and BASF of Germany, and he expects that the rest of his premix business will soon follow. Last summer, Peters said, Roche refused to sell him a key feed ingredient because he would not buy all his vitamins from it, and then proceeded to underbid him with longtime customers. In Texas, Missouri and Minnesota, other small-animal nutritional businesses are facing a similar death squeeze at the hands of Roche and BASF, industry sources said.

Yes, these are the same two global giants that masterminded the most rapacious price-fixing cartel in modern business history during the 1990s and got nailed with the largest criminal fines ever levied. Roche paid $954 million and BASF more than $500 million after entering guilty pleas with the US Department of Justice, Canada, Australia and the European Union.

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