Costco Chicken Under the Microscope: High Contamination and Antibiotic-Resistant Salmonella

In December 2025, Farm Forward published an investigative report revealing that Costco’s Nebraska chicken plant, Lincoln Premium Poultry (LPP), has repeatedly failed USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) salmonella standards since the plant opened in 2019.1  For our latest research, we analyzed salmonella testing data to identify the specific types of salmonella found in the plant from 2020 to 2025.2  Our findings are alarming.

The answers to three questions we asked to evaluate the full scope of the salmonella problem at Costco’s LPP plant, paint a disturbing picture of the risk Costco chicken poses to consumers:

1. How contaminated is the LPP plant?
   —  Highly contaminated: The plant failed FSIS standards 84.5% of the time between 2019 and the end of 2025.
2. How prevalent at LPP are the salmonella strains (serotypes) most likely to cause illness in humans?
   —  Very prevalent: Three of the top serotypes associated with human illness (Enteritidis, Typhurium, and Infantis) made up 59% of positive samples.
3. How resistant to antibiotics that are important for human medicine are LPP salmonella samples, and
   thus how difficult would salmonella infections be to treat?
   —  Extremely resistant: 60% of positive samples were resistant to one or more antibiotics highly important for human medicine and 42% were multidrug resistant.

For Costco shoppers, this means that for chicken coming from the LPP plant: 1) the likelihood of buying chicken that came into stores contaminated is high, 2) the contaminated raw chicken shoppers buy has high probability of containing salmonella that can make them sick, and 3) if consumers do get severely ill, antibiotics used to treat these infections simply may not work.3  LPP currently supplies about 40% of Costco’s chicken.4

The overall 84.5% contamination rate of the LPP plant exacerbates these risks. Because Costco allows salmonella to proliferate in its LPP plant, it has ongoing opportunities to evolve, increase virulence, and develop resistance to vitally important antibiotics.

Costco knows the chicken it produces is contaminated with high rates of salmonella. It knows the strains of salmonella in these products include those most associated with human illness. And it knows that the salmonella found on their products harbors high rates of antibiotic resistance. With the high level of control over chicken in LPP’s supply chain, the company is uniquely suited to solving this problem and reinventing the poultry industry in ways to improve food safety and protect the health of their consumers.