Tag Archives: California crabber

California crabber accuses processor of price fixing

A Portland, Oregon seafood processor, the country’s largest, faces an antitrust class action over what the lead plaintiff says is an egregious case of price fixing in the West Coast’s increasingly unstable Dungeness crab market. Fisherman Brand Little of Auburn, California, filed a putative class action Monday accusing the $945 million company with fixing the price of the highly sought after Dungeness crab, which is found along the coasts and bays between Central California and Alaska. Little says Pacific Seafood, which is owned by Frank Dulcich, the grandson of the company’s founder, has “for at least the last four years, and likely substantially longer” fixed the prices paid to the region’s crabbers. That has in turn dramatically reduced the amount of money earned by the crabbers and priced out customers during the peak demand period while forcing them to buy frozen crab from the previous year, also supplied by Pacific Seafood. >click to read< 12:21