Simplot

Launched two years ago by an American grocery store chain, it calls out four major companies.

McCain Foods and Cavendish Farms, which both have head offices in New Brunswick, and Lamb Weston and J.R. Simplot, which are based in Idaho.

The lawsuit says these four companies control 98% of the frozen potato market in the U.S. and that they unfairly use this advantage to secretly raise prices together starting in 2021.

An Illinois judge recently gave the lawsuit the green light to proceed.

Right.

And that Spectacle is being used, and I'm sure if we did a deep dive, because it's not just Inbu, it's the chemical distributors, SiteOne, Target Specialty, Simplot, Harrell's, Syngenta, even the actual chemical companies themselves have these rebate programs.

And Senator, he's now Congressman from California, he was an amazing ally in picking up very unpopular issues for the right reasons just to protect children.

And I shared the rewards program with him because he was a lawyer at UCI and he looked at the program and he said, it's brilliant because you cannot, I mean, it's almost impossible to trace or follow the money with a gift card.

Story's not over.

Then he got recruited by Simplot Foods to go to Idaho, which is where he really wanted to live.

Not a lot of jobs of that caliber available in Idaho.

He got recruited at Simplot.

Except it is really hard to do everything.

Once you've tried to do everything, which is grow, cart, pack, market, then can you do what Simplot and McCain do? Right.

That's not easy to do.

No, it's

I'd love to be able to help, but it's one of those things where I think council's very disconnected from the issues, a lot of the issues that are facing farmers.

So the farmer that was there that night at the AGM, he was talking about the Simplot issue with being underpaid essentially for the potatoes.

Yeah, like that Simplot is their customer,

right? And

they sell potatoes to them.

sounds like you're trying to figure that out, which is good, because a lot of people just feel like, not my problem, I don't want to think about it.

Even

though it's an issue that I don't know a whole lot about, and that I'm not involved in, I've still sent off an email to Simplot asking questions.

Ag retail is planning for the upcoming 2027 season earlier and with less room for error.

On this episode of The Scoop Podcast, Justin Greer, National Product Manager for CropCare at Invictus CropCare, a Simplot company, explains how his team is watching off patent chemistry and biologicals and why retailers turn inventory faster than they once did.

Then Rory Peddicord, services lead at Winfield United, discusses how its grower finance program is evolving, why he urges producers to focus on liquidity, and what a launch one month earlier says about purchasing timelines.

So stay tuned to this episode of the Scoop podcast.

Hey, Justin, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So I guess first, let's talk a little bit about your role at Invictus and who Invictus is, how it's part of Simplot, your product lineup as well.

Yeah.

I got to sit down with Carl Warkentine.

He's a PCA for Simplot.

Let's go to this interview.

My next guest I'm always excited to talk with because he is one of the great names, the Working Teens.

They're like a living legend family.

Well, we're going to talk with Carl Working Teens.

He's a PCA for Simplot.

Carl, welcome to the show.

And all the tomato paste that were coming from China are probably coming from that slave place made with forced labour.

And Coles and Woolies lap it up because they're buying those products from a company called Simplot, which is an American company.

So go figure.

That's how it works.

Just looking at fertilizer, um, we're talking about, I think I saw the numbers here, annually, over $600 million that we export.

You wanna get specific? Simplot, um, just in 2022 announced how much more business they wanted to do with Canada, specifically in fertilizer.

So the White House may be, uh, arching an eyebrow more than a few businesses.

Farmers and ranchers in Idaho, I would think, are pretty scared.

They're actually from China or a part of China that's been occupied.

And remember Simplot, the American company, they're the ones that deal with Legos.

So they're all in on it, okay? All of them.

This is not good, people.