Since 2020 grocery prices in Minnesota have increased by over 32%, nearly 7% higher than overall inflation during that time. This sharp increase has squeezed family budgets. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that roughly 1 in 10 families nationwide are skipping meals. Food has not only become more expensive in Minnesota, but harder to access. Roughly 10 percent of Minnesotans face food insecurity and in 2025 visits to food shelves were over twice what they were pre-pandemic.
Tying these issues together is the consolidation and anticompetitive conduct in the grocery sector. According to data from the Institute for Local Self Reliance 37% of grocery stores in Minnesota are “mega-chains”, or among the 10 largest chains in the country such as Walmart or Target. While Minnesota is still home to 168 independent grocery stores, analysis in 2016 by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development found that the per capita number of grocery stores in Minnesota was declining. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has found retail consolidation was a key driver in the differences in food inflation rates between metro areas across the country.
One of the central ways large retailers have come to dominate grocery at the expense of rural independent grocers is a tactic called price discrimination. Price discrimination is the practice of charging retailers different prices for the same good, often at the behest of powerful retailers. Since 1936 the practice has technically been outlawed by a federal law known as the Robinson-Patman Act, but enforcement of the law has waned in recent decades. An antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission in 2025 provides a useful illustration of how price discrimination works in practice.
The lawsuit alleged that PepsiCo had acted alongside Walmart to raise costs on consumers. The complaint details how Pepsi acted as Walmart’s personal price cop, monitoring soft drink prices at the retail giant’s competitors to protect the “price gap” between Walmart and its competitors. If a competing retailer ever came too close to matching Walmart’s price, Pepsi would take steps to preserve that gap. While this occasionally involved lowering prices for Walmart, it often meant Pepsi would reduce or eliminate promotional payments to other retailers as a way to increase their wholesale prices.
“Rather than simply working with Walmart to reduce prices, Pepsi’s actions have had the effect of raising prices for customers of competing retailers,” the FTC wrote in the complaint. This meant that Walmart was not using its power and economy of scale to lower prices for consumers, but rather to establish a price floor that is higher than if true competition was allowed to dictate prices. While the lawsuit focused on soft drinks, there is reason to believe that price discrimination has become widespread across the economy, coinciding with the consolidation that has left just four major grocers in control of over half of the market.
The manager of the New London Food Coop, Jessica Rohloff, told Minnesota legislators that her wholesale costs are anywhere from 27-97% higher than the shelf price at a big box retailer. Several years before Rohloff’s testimony, Chuck Linder the owner of grocery stores in Baudette, Pine River and Warroad told legislators that he can get products from a local dollar store for cheaper than what he is charged at wholesale. At the National Rural Grocery Summit in Fargo, North Dakota, Corey Christianson discussed the unfair pricing and onerous mandatory minimums he faces from suppliers at his stores in Badger and Greenbush. Beyond grocery, MFUF has heard from small businesses about price discrimination issues at its Small Business Roundtables.
Price discrimination not only raises costs on consumers, but makes it difficult for rural grocers with razor thin profit margins to compete and remain in business. Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance has found that food deserts first emerged in the late 1980s, coinciding with a shift away from aggressive antitrust enforcement at the beginning of that decade. The loss of rural grocers leaves a gap not often filled by larger corporations, leaving Minnesotans without access to fresh food.
This power over the food supply chain also has impacts on farmers. To keep pace with the growing power of dominant grocery stores, food suppliers and wholesalers have consolidated as well. Meat processing has become dominated by just four companies and most consumer brands are owned by a small group of firms. This consolidation drives down what farmers earn as their share of each dollar we spend on food has been steadily declining from over 50% in the 1950s to less than 16% today.
While short-term shocks like tariffs and high gas prices have contributed to Minnesotan’s sticker shock at the grocery store, consolidation presents a more structural reason behind the high food costs contributing to Minnesota’s cost-of-living crisis.
Since its founding in 1918, Minnesota Farmers Union has advocated for a fairer and more democratic economy that supports farmers, small businesses, workers, consumers and communities. The Antimonopoly Program seeks to connect the impact of this growing concentration across the economy and elevate the voices of those directly impacted by these challenges. Read more from the Antimonopoly program here.