‘Barons’ Author Austin Frerick Explains Why So Few Companies Control So Much of Our Food

In the late 19th century, a few powerful individuals — dubbed “robber barons” by journalists of the time — built monopolies that dominated key industries like steel, rail and meatpacking, squeezing workers for cheap labor while delivering inferior products and services. Now, a century after antitrust regulation diminished the market-distorting power of these original barons, consolidation has once again become a major problem in several industries. Food and agriculture sit at the center of today’s consolidation problem, where just a handful of executives and corporate dynasties exercise outsize control over the prices we see on grocery shelves.

In his new book “Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry,” agriculture and antitrust policy expert Austin Frerick charts the story of these modern monopolists and how they leveraged lax regulations and exploiting subsidy programs to gain market share and reshape the grocery industry, hog farming, meatpacking, coffee trading and more.