Filing details the top Tyson pay

Top salaries at Tyson Foods Inc. were reported last week by KATV of Little Rock, Arkansas, based upon the company’s annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The TV station reported that chief executive officer Noel White’s total compensation in fiscal 2019 was $10,398,000.

That figure includes base salary, stock awards, stock option awards and other benefits.

Tyson Foods board chairman John Tyson received compensation of $10,322,000.

Tyson is the parent company of Tyson Mexican Original of Portland.

Changing hands

A Celina-based manufacturer of corporate awards — Visions/AwardCraft — may have a new owner.

If the deal proceeds, the new owners would maintain Vision's operations and keep its 107 employees, The Daily Standard reported.

The Standard said Visionary Partners Ltd. wants to acquire Visions/AwardCraft from Eighth Floor Promotions LLC. Coldwater-based Signature Partners has a 70% stake in Visionary Partners.

According to The Standard, Visionary Partners has applied for a $500,000 revolving loan that would be applied toward a proposed $1.51 million purchase of equipment at Visions' Celina facility.

Beef recall

Tyson Foods Inc.’s Advance Pierre Foods has recalled ready-to-eat beef patty products for possible plastic contamination, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced this week.

The products were shipped to a single distribution location in Iowa, which then distributed the beef patties to institutions, including schools. The product was not sold in retail stores, the government said.

The agency said the recall was initiated after Advance Pierre Foods received a complaint from a foodservice establishment concerning green soft plastic found in a patty.

The recall involves about 15,739 pounds of beef patty products produced on Sept. 11, 2019.

Turkey suit

Tyson is one of the companies involved in a new class-action suit alleging that turkey companies conspired to raise prices for most of the past decade.

The Food and Environment Reporting Network said the allegations all revolve around the use of reports on industry production and pricing made by a secretive data company called Agri Stats.

Filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, the suit alleges that between 2010 and 2017, the country’s largest turkey companies conspired to artificially hike prices by coordinating production cuts.

The suit was brought by Olean Wholesale Grocery Cooperative and John Gross and Company, two food distributors and wholesalers based in New York and Pennsylvania, respectively.

The defendants in the case include Cargill, Hormel, Butterball, Farbest, Agri Stats, Foster Farms, Kraft Heinz, Hormel Foods and Tyson Foods.

The suit contends that the companies coordinated to raise prices at industry conventions, through public discussion of production cuts, and by analyzing competitor data contained in Agri Stats reports.

“These reports, unavailable to anybody besides Agri Stats subscribers, allowed the integrator defendants to easily identify potential opportunities where their prices for turkey products were significantly lower than their competitors,” the complaint says, thus making it possible for companies to coordinate those prices.

A former accountant for Cooper Farms is a confidential witness in the suit.