Hormel Foods Files Lawsuit Against Johnsonville and Two Former Employees

A federal lawsuit filed by Austin, Minn.-based Hormel Foods accuses Johnsonville and two former Hormel employees who joined the Sheboygan Falls, Wis.-based company of conspiring to unlawfully obtain Hormel’s trade secrets, according to a news reports.

The lawsuit asks that confidential data, including sausage recipes and market intelligence, transferred from Hormel to be returned and deleted, and it also requests unspecified monetary damages. According to the suit, Hormel employee Brett Sims left the company to become chief supply chain officer for Johnsonville in June 2023, and began attempts to convince other Hormel employees to also leave to join Johnsonville, in conflict with a non-solicitation agreement.

Another Hormel employee, Jeremy Rummel, eventually also joined Johnsonville during the spring of 2025. Rummel is accused of sending product formulas, processing procedures, acquisition-target information and marketing-strategy information to his personal email, prior to telling Hormel he was departing the company for a competitor, the lawsuit alleges.

Rummel confessed to sending the information to his personal email after Hormel confronted him about it, and then he allegedly went to Sims’ house to share details of the exchange between himself and Hormel, and devise a way to protect his new role at Johnsonville, the suit says. It goes on to say that Johnsonville was not cooperative with Hormel in response to a letter detailing these accusations and seeking assurances from the sausage processor.

None of the parties involved commented on the lawsuit to the media, except that Hormel told one news outlet it believes its complaint “speaks for itself.”