In In re: Wholesale Grocery Products Antitrust Litigation, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed certain retailers to pursue their claims against SuperValu Inc. and C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc., instead of forcing them to go to arbitration. Several retailers are each trying to bring class action antitrust claims against either SuperValu or C&S over an agreement the two wholesalers allegedly reached to exchange certain customer supply contracts and not to compete with one another for those customers for a set period of time. However, each retailer not only had a supply agreement with one of the wholesalers but also an arbitration agreement, forcing the retailers to each only sue the wholesaler with whom they did not sign an arbitration contract.
The wholesalers moved to compel arbitration, maintaining that they could still force all of the antitrust claims into arbitration either through the equitable estoppel theory or the notion that the wholesalers had essentially inherited the arbitration agreements from the wholesalers that originally signed them as part of the contract exchange. In a split decision, the Eighth Circuit disagreed with the defendants, holding that the retailers’ claims against the nonsignatory wholesalers are not “so intertwined with the agreement containing the arbitration clause that it would be unfair to allow the signatory to rely on the agreement in formulating its claims but to disavow availability of the arbitration clause of that same agreement.” The court further held that the claims at stake do not stem directly from the contract that included the arbitration clause, so plaintiffs would have had a statutory right to bring antitrust suit against defendants they did not contract with, regardless of the supply and arbitration deals.