A federal judge has denied a request by retailers Winn-Dixie and Bi-Lo for additional discovery in the mushroom price-fixing antitrust litigation.

U.S. District Judge Berle Schiller of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania's ruling relates to the plaintiffs' request for the defendants—members of the Eastern Mushroom Marketing Cooperative—to produce documents on mushroom sales. Schiller granted leave for the plaintiffs to refile.

Two particular defendant mushroom-sellers, Monterey Mushrooms and Modern Mushroom Farms, claimed they did not have the documents the plaintiffs requested. According to Schiller, the plaintiffs argued in their motion to compel that the defendants refused to provide documents on a "range of topics" addressing the reasonableness of the defendants' search attempt.

"The problem with plaintiffs' argument is that it wrongly assumes the burden is on defendants to provide enough information to prove their document search was reasonable," Schiller said in his June 29 opinion. "The burden, however, rests with plaintiffs to show that defendants' search was not reasonable. Plaintiffs cannot carry that burden by pointing to all the information they do not know about defendants' methodology. The mere absence of that information is not enough for a court to grant a motion to compel."

William DeStefano of Stevens & Lee represents the defendants and said, "It was in our view a correct result, and I thought it was a well-written and well-reasoned opinion."

Krishna Narine of Lauletta Birnbaum represents the plaintiffs and declined to comment.

Schiller cleared the lawsuit to move forward last year. Winn-Dixie and co-plaintiff Bi-Lo claimed that the mushroom farms violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by engaging in "naked price-fixing and conspired among themselves and in conjunction with [non-EMMC member] distributors to set artificially inflated [mushroom] prices," according to Schiller's April 2019 opinion.

The plaintiffs also accused the cooperative of "'meeting and agreeing to fix the price of Agaricus mushrooms' and 'by collectively interfering with, penalizing and retaliating against any non-EMMC growers that sought to sell at prices that were below the artificially-inflated prices set by EMMC,'" Schiller had said.

In requesting dismissal of the lawsuit, the defendants claimed the plaintiffs' allegations were not specific enough to move forward, claiming that there are no differences in the allegations against the cooperative and the individual member farms.

But the judge said that in the early stages of the litigation, it didn't matter.

"Winn-Dixie plaintiffs have furnished a clue as to which of the EMMC members allegedly agreed to the alleged conspiratorial scheme and 'when and where the illicit agreement took place," Schiller said. "At this stage of the litigation, the court must accept these allegations as true."