For millions of Americans, a Costco rotisserie chicken signals comfort, convenience, and value. It’s the meal you grab after a long workday, the centerpiece of a busy family’s weeknight dinner, or the secret ingredient in countless soups, salads, and casseroles.
But while the $4.99 chicken has earned near-mythic status among shoppers, most don’t know what’s happening long before that bird reaches grocery shelves Few realize that the chicken they’re placing into their cart may have come from a facility that, according to Farm Forward’s analysis of USDA data, fails federal salmonella safety standards year after year and has been cited repeatedly for animal welfare violations.
Costco has a salmonella problem and a welfare problem, and the company is doing little to fix it, relying instead on consumers’ ignorance about what goes on behind the scenes in its chicken supply chain. Farm Forward’s latest research pulls back the curtain on the company’s dirty secret that poses a significant threat to public health.
In 2019, Costco’s Lincoln Premium Poultry (LPP) opened a $450 million poultry complex in Fremont, Nebraska—its first-ever attempt to raise, slaughter, and process chickens entirely in-house. It was hailed as a revolution in retail: a company so determined to keep its chicken at $4.99 that it built an entire supply chain from the ground up. This model of vertical integration means that the company controls every stage of production, from hatcheries and feed mills to grower farms to processing, slaughter, and retail distribution.
Every year, the LPP plant processes more than 100 million chickens for Costco’s rotisserie chickens and Kirkland Signature raw chicken breasts. Every year, 7.2 million of these birds die from disease or mistreatment before they even reach slaughter. Every year, salmonella-contaminated products are shipped to Costco stores around the country to be purchased by unsuspecting shoppers.
Controlling the supply chain was supposed to guarantee quality and safety. But from the moment the plant opened, USDA records tell a very different story.
Farm Forward’s review of USDA inspection records reveal that it’s a lot. The USDA sets standards for salmonella contamination based on a three-category system for poultry plants. Category 3 plants fail the standard. Costco’s LPP plant has received a Category 3 rating 92% of the time since it opened in 2019. This means that from day one, the plant has had a chronic contamination problem and has failed year after year to clean up its act.
USDA’s salmonella standards allow for shockingly high rates of contamination, even in products that pass the standard. A passing grade allows for contamination in 9.8% of whole chicken carcasses (like those used for the rotisserie bird) and 15.4% of chicken parts (like Kirkland Signature’s raw chicken breasts). But LPP fails the standard nearly all of the time, meaning that contamination rates in chicken coming into Costco stores could be much higher than even these shockingly high contamination thresholds.
How does this translate for shoppers? More than roughly 1 in 10 of whole chickens from the LPP plant destined for the rotisserie came into the store contaminated with salmonella and more than roughly 1 in 6 packages of raw chicken breasts from that plant are contaminated. This means that if you routinely pick up a couple of packages of chicken breasts during your weekly Costco shopping trip, the likelihood is high that you’re bringing home chicken with this dangerous foodborne pathogen every month. When you line up at the checkout with that rotisserie chicken in your cart, more than one of every ten chickens unloaded onto the conveyor belt could have entered the store contaminated with salmonella.
You’d think that failing the USDA’s salmonella safety standard would prevent a company like Costco from selling highly contaminated products. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Although the USDA can inspect and assign passing and failing ratings (and these are posted publicly on the agency’s website), USDA does not have the authority to stop the sale of or issue recalls for highly contaminated products, nor does it have the power to shut down plants that repeatedly fail the standard or issue any corrective action for the worst offenders.
In 2024, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service proposed a “Salmonella Framework for Raw Poultry Products” that would have designated salmonella as an adulterant in raw poultry—a move that would have made it illegal to sell products adulterated with the pathogen. In April 2025, this proposed rule was withdrawn. The result? USDA continues to be powerless in regulating salmonella and companies like Costco continue to sell highly contaminated products.
The poultry industry claims that salmonella contamination is an unavoidable problem. But this obscures the reality: the way that birds are bred, raised, and slaughtered for meat is an intentional choice by an industry that creates the perfect breeding ground for pathogens and the spread of dangerous diseases.
Salmonella isn’t just a problem during slaughter and processing (although that’s the only place that the USDA tracks contamination)—it starts upstream with the very genetics of the birds and travels through every stage of the supply chain.
Costco’s birds, like most in the poultry industry, are bred to grow so abnormally fast that their legs often buckle beneath them, meaning many can barely walk. Their bodies grow faster than their immune systems can keep up, leaving them more vulnerable to illness—including salmonella.
Hatcheries are where salmonella contamination begins as the pathogen is passed through the eggs to the chicks who then carry the disease through the rest of the supply chain. Contamination is accelerated when chickens are raised in barns that hold tens of thousands of birds in dimly lit spaces thick with ammonia fumes, feces, and dead birds. When animals live in these conditions, disease travels fast.
Transport is yet another site of cross contamination, culminating in slaughter and processing where the birds are bled out and dismembered, spreading salmonella throughout the plants and ending up in packages destined for Costco’s stores.
Suffering birds make sick birds and sick birds make people sick. USDA acknowledges that stress and poor welfare increase pathogen levels in farmed birds. Stress is endemic in industrial chicken production: intensive confinement, overcrowding, abrupt handling, rough transport, extreme temperatures, and processing birds for slaughter all weaken their defenses, opening the door for bacteria to spread.
Farm Forward’s analysis shows a clear overlap between Costco’s worst salmonella ratings and a series of humane handling violations at the LPP plant. USDA inspection reports show that, in recent years, thousands of Costco birds have died during transport—freezing to death, suffocating in overcrowded trucks, or perishing in a trailer fire. A 2021 Mercy for Animals investigation painted an even starker picture: dim barns thick with ammonia, birds too large to stand, open sores, and animals unable to reach food or water. Costco dismissed much of the footage as “normal and uneventful activity,” a telling reflection of how deeply these conditions are baked into its low-cost model.
Federal welfare protections do not apply to farmed birds, and adherence to what few welfare guidelines there are is entirely voluntary for the industry. Companies are not, then, held accountable for either salmonella contamination or animal welfare, despite the growing body of evidence that links the two.
Following the public outcry around Costco’s cruelty to its chickens, a shareholder lawsuit against the company for mistreatment of birds, and the 7.2 million birds Costco reports die before reaching slaughter each year, the company has shown no progress. Its persistent salmonella failures reveal what happens when poor welfare and weak oversight collide—and the hidden risks that come with that cheap Costco chicken.
On the surface, Costco’s rotisserie chicken looks like the ultimate win for consumers: filling, affordable, delicious. But the true cost is hidden—from crowded barns to weak regulations to contamination that slips through the cracks of a system not built to protect shoppers.
What began as a strategy to keep prices low has become a long-running public-health concern. And until Costco confronts the conditions under which its chickens are raised, processed, and transported, shoppers may continue paying a price far beyond $4.99.
For more detail on the true costs of Costco’s chicken, read Farm Forward’s issue brief. To learn more about salmonella contamination and animal welfare issues across the poultry industry—and where Costco’s supply chain fits into the bigger picture—read our full investigative report.