If you’ve ever been to a Costco, you’ve probably grabbed one. The $4.99 rotisserie chicken sitting under those heat lamps near the back of the store is practically an American institution at this point. The company sold 157.4 million of them worldwide in fiscal year 2025 alone. That’s over 431,000 chickens every single day.
But that beloved bird is now sitting at the center of not one but two class-action lawsuits — one alleging chronic salmonella contamination at Costco’s massive Nebraska poultry plant, and another claiming the company lied about what’s actually in the chicken. Both cases raise uncomfortable questions about what corners get cut when a corporation is determined to sell you a whole cooked chicken for less than the price of a Starbucks latte.
The Salmonella Lawsuit Paints an Ugly Picture
On February 12, 2026, a woman named Lisa Taylor of Affton, Missouri filed a class-action lawsuit against Costco in Seattle federal court. Taylor says she routinely bought one or two rotisserie chickens a month from Costco warehouses in the St. Louis area. Her complaint isn’t that she got sick — it’s that she believes she overpaid because Costco never told consumers about the contamination risk lurking in its supply chain.
The numbers in the lawsuit are genuinely alarming. According to the 37-page complaint, Costco’s Lincoln Premium Poultry facility in Fremont, Nebraska — a $450 million operation that opened in 2019 — failed every single monthly salmonella test from late 2023 through mid-2025. Not most of them. All of them. The plant has earned the USDA’s worst food safety rating, Category 3, in roughly 92% of reporting periods since it opened. A Category 3 rating means the plant exceeded the USDA’s allowable contamination rates.
The actual contamination numbers are stark: more than 9.8% of whole chickens and 15.4% of chicken parts coming out of the facility tested positive for salmonella contamination. An October 2025 Consumer Reports study based on five years of data identified the Nebraska plant as one of the most contaminated poultry plants in the entire country.
Why Costco Built Its Own Chicken Empire
To understand how this happened, you have to understand why Costco built the Nebraska facility in the first place. The company opened the plant specifically to vertically integrate its chicken supply — controlling the process from egg to shelf. The goal was straightforward: reduce costs and maintain the $4.99 price point that has stayed the same since the chickens debuted around the year 2000.
Think about that for a second. Adjusted for inflation, Costco should be charging around $8.31 for a rotisserie chicken today. The company has raised the price exactly once in over two decades — a temporary $1 bump during the 2008 financial crisis that it reversed the following year. The Nebraska facility processes over 100 million chickens annually, enough to supply about 43% of Costco’s rotisserie chicken needs and 33% of its raw chicken supply. The operation was expected to save the company up to $0.35 per bird.
The lawsuit’s central argument is that this obsession with cost-cutting is exactly what created the contamination problem. By prioritizing the $4.99 price tag above all else, Taylor’s complaint alleges, Costco sacrificed the safety of its product. The complaint stated plainly that “Costco has prioritized keeping its chickens at $4.99 over ensuring those chickens are safe to eat.”
The Second Lawsuit: What’s Actually in That Chicken?
The salmonella case isn’t the only legal headache for Costco’s chicken operation. Back in January, two California consumers — Bianca Johnston of Big Bear and Anastasia Chernov of Escondido — filed a separate class-action lawsuit in a Southern California district court. Their complaint was different but equally damaging: they say Costco falsely advertised its Kirkland Signature Seasoned Rotisserie Chicken as containing no preservatives.
The problem? The chickens contain sodium phosphate and carrageenan — two additives that the plaintiffs argue function as preservatives. Costco says it uses these ingredients for moisture retention, texture, and product consistency during cooking. But the lawsuit argues that’s just a different way of saying they preserve the chicken’s taste, texture, and shelf life — which is what preservatives do.
Both plaintiffs said they relied on the “No Preservatives” claim when deciding to buy the chicken, and that they wouldn’t have purchased it — or would have paid less — if they’d known it contained those additives. Their attorney, Wesley M. Griffith of the Almeida Law Group, put it bluntly: “Consumers reasonably rely on clear, prominent claims like ‘No Preservatives,’ especially when deciding what they and their families will eat.”
Costco Already Changed Its Signs
Here’s the thing that makes the preservatives case interesting: Costco didn’t exactly fight back. After the lawsuit was filed, the company quietly removed all references to preservatives from its in-store signage and online product listings. In a statement, Costco said it wanted to “maintain consistency among the labeling on our rotisserie chickens and the signs in our warehouses and online presentations.”
The company didn’t admit wrongdoing. But taking down the signs sure looks like an acknowledgment that the “No Preservatives” claim was, at minimum, a stretch. Federal regulators have classified both sodium phosphate and carrageenan as safe to eat, so there’s no health scare here. This lawsuit is really about honesty in marketing — whether a company can slap “No Preservatives” on a product that contains ingredients performing preservative functions.
The lawsuit alleges Costco “systemically cheated customers out of tens — if not hundreds — of millions of dollars” through this labeling. That’s a big claim, but when you consider Costco sold 157.4 million rotisserie chickens last year, even a small percentage of customers who relied on that “No Preservatives” label adds up fast.
The Rotisserie Chicken Is a Loss Leader — and That Matters
None of this exists in a vacuum. Costco’s rotisserie chicken has always been a strategic product, not just a grocery item. The company almost certainly loses money on every single bird it sells. At $4.99, the chicken is cheaper per pound than even Walmart’s offering. So why keep selling it?
Because the chicken gets you into the store. Costco places its rotisserie chickens at the very back, next to wine (which carries a 14% margin) and prepared side dishes. You walk in for a five-dollar chicken and walk out with $200 worth of stuff in your cart. The company makes most of its actual profit from membership fees, which run $60 to $120 a year. The chicken is the bait. The membership is the hook.
This business model explains a lot about why Costco might cut corners on food safety or marketing accuracy. When a product is designed to lose money from day one, there’s enormous pressure to squeeze costs wherever possible. Building a $450 million facility to control the supply chain was already an extreme measure to protect a five-dollar price point. The lawsuits suggest that cost pressure may have bled into safety and transparency.
What Lisa Taylor Wants
In the salmonella case, Taylor is seeking compensatory and triple damages for anyone who bought Kirkland Signature rotisserie chicken or raw chicken products since January 1, 2019. The proposed class would cover all purchasers in the United States during that period. The lawsuit cites violations of Washington consumer protection laws and argues Costco broke an implied promise that its chickens are safe to eat.
The complaint draws heavily on a December 2025 study by Farm Forward that criticized safety conditions at the Nebraska plant. It also references the Consumer Reports study and extensive USDA inspection records. The case argues that despite knowing about these contamination problems for years, Costco continued to sell the chickens while marketing them as safe and wholesome — with USDA Grade A inspection marks still displayed on the packaging.
It’s worth keeping in mind that cooking chicken to the proper internal temperature kills salmonella. Rotisserie chickens come pre-cooked, which reduces the direct risk to consumers buying the hot prepared birds. But the raw chicken products from the same facility are a different story, and the lawsuit covers those too.
What This Means for Costco Shoppers Right Now
Both lawsuits are in their early stages, and neither has been certified as a class action yet. That’s an important distinction — filing a class action and actually getting it certified are two very different things. Costco hasn’t publicly commented on the salmonella lawsuit beyond the complaint itself, and it didn’t admit any wrongdoing regarding the preservatives labeling.
But the facts laid out in these complaints — especially the salmonella testing data — are not opinions or allegations pulled from thin air. They’re based on USDA records, Consumer Reports data, and independent studies. A plant that fails every monthly salmonella test for roughly 18 months isn’t dealing with a one-off problem. That’s a systemic failure.
For the 157.4 million chickens Costco moves every year, these lawsuits represent a genuine threat to one of the most successful loss-leader strategies in American retail. The $4.99 chicken has survived two decades of inflation, a pandemic, and supply chain chaos. Whether it survives the courtroom might depend on how seriously Costco takes what’s happening inside that Nebraska plant.
