The Costco Rotisserie Chicken Lawsuit: What They’re Not Telling You
February 2026 | Consumer Watchdog Commentary
I’ll admit it: I’m an Erin Brockovich fan. I believe in the power of a well-founded lawsuit. When there’s real wrongdoing — corporate cover-ups, documented harm, executives who knowingly put people at risk while hiding the evidence — the courtroom is exactly the right place to hold them accountable. That kind of legal action changes industries, protects communities, and rights genuine wrongs.
But that’s also exactly why my radar went off when I read about the Costco rotisserie chicken lawsuit. The story was alarming on its face — salmonella! Your $4.99 chicken! — but the more I dug into it, the more questions I had. Specifically: where is the actual victim here? And is this the kind of lawsuit Erin Brockovich would actually get behind?
Let’s break it down.
Yes, The Lawsuit Is Real
Filed in Seattle federal court on February 13, 2026, the proposed class action was brought by a Missouri woman named Lisa Taylor, who claims she regularly purchased Costco rotisserie chickens. The suit targets Costco’s Lincoln Premium Poultry plant in Fremont, Nebraska — a massive facility capable of processing over 100 million chickens per year. The complaint alleges the plant consistently failed USDA salmonella standards, with contamination rates on whole chickens exceeding 9.8% and chicken parts topping 15.4%, and that the facility failed every monthly salmonella test from late 2023 through mid-2025.
Those allegations are backed by USDA testing data and a 2025 Consumer Reports investigation that ranked the Nebraska plant among the most contaminated poultry facilities in the country. So yes — there’s something here worth paying attention to.
But Wait — How Does This Actually Hurt Anyone?
Here’s where it gets complicated. The rotisserie chicken you pull off the rack at Costco is fully cooked. Proper cooking kills salmonella. So the risk isn’t in eating the chicken hot out of the bag — it’s in what happens after you bring it home.
Cross-contamination is the real hazard: juices from the packaging dripping in your refrigerator, using the same cutting board for chicken and then a salad, reheating leftovers that don’t quite reach a safe internal temperature. Real risks — but risks that exist with every poultry product from every producer.
And here’s the legal problem: if you bought the chicken, ate it, and felt fine — what exactly are your damages? The class action rests on a “price premium” theory: that consumers overpaid for a product that didn’t meet the safety standards they expected. Courts have grown increasingly skeptical of this argument. No injury, no damages. No damages, no case.
Costco Is a Big, Easy Target — But Where’s the Actual Victim?
Here’s the detail that jumped out at me — conspicuously absent from most of the media coverage: nowhere in the lawsuit, and nowhere in any reporting on it, is there any mention of Lisa Taylor personally getting sick. No illness. No doctor’s visit. No medical bills. No hospitalization. Her stated “damages” are simply that she believes she overpaid for chicken because Costco didn’t warn her about contamination risks at its Nebraska plant.
That’s a meaningful distinction. Erin Brockovich’s clients had cancer. They had dead family members. They had a paper trail of documented, real-world harm tied to a specific corporate decision. This lawsuit has a Missouri woman who bought chicken regularly and felt fine. That’s not a personal criticism of Lisa Taylor — she may have been approached by attorneys specifically looking for a named plaintiff. But it should make you think about who is actually driving this case.
The answer, once you trace it back, is Farm Forward — an animal rights nonprofit whose stated mission is to “end factory farming.” They published a study in December 2025 criticizing the Nebraska plant, and within weeks a class action lawsuit citing that very study was filed in Seattle. The legal machinery moved fast and with purpose. Costco has deep pockets and a $400 billion market cap — an attractive target. But Costco isn’t the only company with contaminated poultry plants. USDA data shows that facilities operated by Butterball, Cargill, Perdue, and Koch Foods received the worst possible Category 3 ratings every single month from 2020 through 2024. Perdue alone had four plants at the worst level 95% of the time. So why isn’t anyone suing them?
What About the Hot Dogs at 7-Eleven?
While we’re at it: what about the frankfurters spinning on the roller grill at your local convenience store? Who knows how long those have been sitting out, at what temperature, under what inspection regime? Yet there’s no class action targeting them. Our outrage — and our litigation — tends to follow the money, not the actual risk. USDA-inspected facilities, whatever their flaws, operate under federal oversight. Many convenience food items face far less scrutiny.
How Many People Actually Die From Salmonella — And Who’s Really to Blame?
This is where the data gets both sobering and surprising. According to the CDC, salmonella causes roughly 1.35 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations, and approximately 420 deaths in the United States every year. That is not a small number. Every one of those deaths matters, and anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t paying attention.
• 1.35 million infections
• 26,500 hospitalizations
• ~420 deaths
• $3.7–4.1 billion in economic costs
Source: CDC / USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service
But here is where it gets complicated — and where your instincts about this lawsuit are validated by the data. The vast majority of salmonella cases are extremely difficult to trace back to a single corporate source. Most people who get sick never get tested. Those who do get tested rarely have their illness traced to a specific food item. And those cases that are traced often point somewhere surprising.
Research shows that most poultry-related salmonella outbreaks — 84% of outbreaks and 98% of associated illnesses — occur in private homes, not in restaurants or institutional settings. Think about what that means: the contamination may originate at a plant, but the illness almost always results from something that happened in someone’s kitchen. Improper storage. Cross-contamination on a cutting board. Chicken left in a warm car too long on the way home (your point exactly). Leftovers reheated at too low a temperature.
More striking still: even ProPublica — in a deeply reported investigation that is highly critical of the poultry industry — found that salmonella illness rates in humans have remained completely flat for two decades, even as contamination rates in raw poultry have actually declined. That strongly suggests the problem is not simply about what’s happening at the processing plant. It’s systemic, it’s complex, and it cannot be solved by suing Costco.
As for deaths specifically attributable to corporate negligence at a poultry plant — versus deaths caused by home mishandling, immune-compromised individuals, or untraceable sources — that number is essentially impossible to isolate. The CDC does not publish a breakdown that says “X deaths caused by Plant Y.” There is no data tying a single death to the Lincoln Premium Poultry facility specifically. Zero. And without that, the legal foundation of this lawsuit becomes very shaky indeed.
Can’t the Government Just Force a Recall?
This is the question everyone should be asking — and the answer is genuinely shocking. For most food hazards, yes: the USDA can push for a recall when contamination is found. Recalls happen regularly for E. coli, Listeria, and foreign material like metal or glass.
But for salmonella specifically in raw poultry? No. Salmonella is not legally classified as an “adulterant” under current federal law for raw meat and poultry — which means it is technically legal to sell raw chicken that tests positive for it. There were zero salmonella-based recalls for meat or poultry in all of 2025.
The USDA tried to change this. In August 2024, the Biden administration proposed a new rule that would have classified certain salmonella levels as adulterants, finally giving inspectors the authority to pull contaminated product. The poultry industry called it “regulatory overreach” and pushed back hard. The Trump administration withdrew the proposed rule entirely in April 2025. And that legal history is not new — back in 1998, a Texas beef processor actually sued the USDA for trying to close plants over salmonella, and won in federal appeals court on the argument that salmonella is naturally occurring. That ruling has constrained regulators ever since.
So the next time you wonder why nobody stopped this chicken from reaching your Costco — that’s your answer. Not incompetence. Not laziness. The law literally does not allow them to stop it.
The Bigger Problem: A System With Real Gaps
Even setting the adulterant question aside, the USDA faces a structural problem: its jurisdiction ends at the slaughter and processing plant. What happens upstream on the farms — where contamination often begins — falls under a different agency entirely. Nearly all commercial chickens in the U.S. descend from birds bred by just two companies, meaning a single contaminated breeding flock can potentially affect millions of birds across the entire supply chain. A 2025 GAO report found that the two agencies’ coordination agreement hadn’t been meaningfully updated since 2014.
That is the real scandal buried inside this story. And it won’t be fixed in a courtroom.
Think About Who Actually Buys That Chicken
Before we treat this lawsuit as a consumer victory, let’s think about who actually depends on that $4.99 rotisserie chicken. It’s seniors on fixed incomes who buy one bird a month and stretch it across multiple meals — a few slices for dinner, the rest for sandwiches, the carcass simmered into soup stock on the weekend. It’s families of four who can’t afford a raw whole chicken and two hours of oven time on a Tuesday night. It’s people watching sodium for health reasons who keep their portions small and use it mostly as a stretcher, or to feed the whole family when everyone gets together. For those folks, $4.99 isn’t a deal. It’s the plan.
A class action lawsuit that forces Costco to reformulate, pull, or significantly reprice its rotisserie chicken does not hurt a corporation in any meaningful way. It hurts the people who needed that meal. That human cost is completely invisible in the media coverage, and it deserves to be said out loud.
The Bottom Line
Important legal note first: this is still only a proposed class action. A federal judge has not certified it. It has not been reviewed or validated by any court. It may never get that far. A proposed class action is a legal filing — not a verdict, not a finding of wrongdoing, and not proof of anything against Costco or anyone else.
The underlying data about contamination at the Nebraska plant is real and worth monitoring. But this lawsuit faces serious legal headwinds: the named plaintiff never got sick, the damages theory is weak, the suit was effectively assembled by an activist organization rather than a community of harmed individuals, and the science on salmonella attribution does not support singling out one retailer when the problem is industry-wide and deeply systemic.
And if the lawsuit is legally shaky because the product is technically legal to sell even with high salmonella contamination levels? Then yes — that shakiness goes to the heart of the case. It is very hard to win a lawsuit for selling a product that the law explicitly permits you to sell.
If you’re concerned about food safety, the practical advice is simple and effective: wash your hands and all surfaces after handling any poultry packaging, refrigerate leftovers within two hours, and always reheat chicken to an internal temperature of 165°F throughout — the USDA safe minimum for both cooking and reheating poultry. A $15 instant-read thermometer is the most protective thing you can put in your kitchen drawer.
If you’re genuinely outraged about salmonella in the food supply — good. Direct that energy at Congress and the USDA. Demand that salmonella be classified as an adulterant in raw poultry. Demand that the two federal agencies responsible for food safety update their 2014 coordination agreement. Demand that inspectors be given the legal tools to do their jobs. That’s the fight worth having. Not a $5 chicken.
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