Law firm sues Kellogg for not enough strawberries in Pop-Tarts
foodprocessing.com
foodprocessing.com
/edit to include cookie name
Pic: https://twitter.com/cicada3301_kig/status/131419416269930905...
(Yes, the eggs have shrunk)
I did eat them, but at an age that I'd eat pretty much anything.
We went through the "Low Fat" period where "fat" was removed and replaced with sugar. Probably less animal fats and more palm oil along the way or fried in peanut oil, etc...
There is a lot of foods that I had as a kid that I don't consume now nor even offer my kids.
If you're reading this as an Ivy League business school student, I hope you outlive your kids.
Damn you MBAs!!! <shakes fist at air>
But if you want to go ahead and be a ignorant lemming like these companies want you to be, by all means do so; It doesn't change reality.
https://www.punchfork.com/recipe/Paleo-Strawberry-Homemade-P...
(Edit: 's/that was/frosted brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts were/' - to spell out just how "these are not health food" obvious the label on 'em is.)
Nothing changed, but you redesigned the formulation? What does that mean?
Changing the ratio of filling/ crust/ icing would change the taste
Older pop-tarts had mostly rectangular icing but now one edge has a semi-circle shape. Coincidentally, this is the side they show cut off on the front of the box to show the filling.
Grenadine tastes more like cherry flavoring than pomegranates. Heck, cherry flavoring doesn't taste much like cherries either.
Cocktail cherries are another cocktail ingredient with a similar insane drift from their origins - good quality Luxardos taste amazing and fruity and come packed in this deep purple fruity maraschino syrup, while supermarket Maraschino Cherries taste... well... awful.
source: I watched too many Youtube "How To Drink" videos on the history of cocktails at the start of the pandemic and ended up picking up a new hobby.
That's really funny because I do. I hate the sugary "frosting" crap so I only buy the unfrosted ones (for myself, that is). But honestly, the crust is the best part of the whole experience.
Reasonable Consumer Would Know “Crunchberries” Are Not Real, Judge Rules[0]
Yet Another Lawsuit About the Lack of Fruit in “Froot Loops”[1]
“Hint of Lime” Case: It’s Not Crunch Berries, But It’s Close[2]
[0]: https://loweringthebar.net/2009/06/reasonable-consumer-would...
[1]: https://loweringthebar.net/2010/04/yet-another-lawsuit-claim...
[2]: https://loweringthebar.net/2021/06/hint-of-lime-case-its-not...
As an example, https://www.yoplait.com/products/original-single-serve-straw... has 27g carbohydrates. An 8oz Coke has 26g.
Not sure about the North American markets but plain old Natural/Greek yoghurt is a good way to avoid tons of added sugar. The majority of them in the UK are not desserts masquerading as sugar. They’re around 3-5% sugar from the milk.
Kroger's (popular grocery store) house brand of vanilla yogurt is 4.6g of sugar per ounce. Their Greek version of that product is about half that sugar level.
Noosa vanilla bean yogurt is 4g of sugar per ounce. Their Lemon flavor is 4.3g of sugar per ounce.
Yoplait original strawberry is 3.1g of sugar per ounce.
Chobani greek yogurt with strawberries added is 2.5g of sugar per ounce.
Walmart's house brand of vanilla yogurt is 2.5g of sugar per ounce. Walmart's house brand of plain greek yogurt is about 1g of total sugar per ounce, claiming no added sugars.
The Greek Gods plain Greek yogurt is 1.5g of total sugar per ounce.
Oikos plain greek yogurt is around 1.1g of total sugar per ounce.
Oikos sells a "triple zero" brand of supposedly greek yogurt that is popular at grocery stores in the US. It claims zero sugar, zero sugar added, zero artificial sweeteners. It lists Stevia as its fourth ingredient (I guess they get to claim that's simultaneously not sugar and not an artificial sweetener).
Chobani makes a zero sugar line, that claims to have zero sugar and no artificial sweeteners. However they list Allulose on the label, which is really just a sugar (D-psicose).
The Two Good brand claims 0.38g of sugar per ounce, they use Stevia as the sweetener.
The US has about 4,000 yogurt options to choose from. That might be nice but it actually makes it annoying to sort through and find the quality options in the pile.
And due to the Greek yogurt fad it’s actually hard to get normal yogurt from any brand except for large containers.
First, marketing: they cleverly declare that the product has "No high fructose corn syrup", while they added a lot of sugars (13g/26%!!). I'm looking forward the next product declaring "no added cyanide" :)
The second is classifications of sugar. The "carbohydrates" term is too generic to ascertain the type(s) (and associated health impact); for example, 100g of dry beans are certainly a good meal, but in terms of labelling, they're around 90% of "carbohydrates" (one needs to look at the "sugars" label).
On this product label, around 8g are not "sugars", in other words, not simple carbohydrates, but I don't understand where they come from, based on the ingredients; they could be starch, but the label says <1% of corn starch. I wonder if "modified corn starch" classifies as "not corn starch", which would explain the missing 8g.
One pop tart with peanut butter is better than two pop tarts
I would highly recommend the kind with only 2 ingredients that separates at room temperature. Yeah, it sucks to have to stir it, but you only need to do that once per jar if you put it in the fridge afterward. Alternatively, just eat a couple handfuls of minimally processed peanuts or whatever other nuts/legumes you prefer along with the less healthy stuff. They improve the nutrition value of almost any meal (provided you're not allergic, of course).
Try turning it over and put butter on it while hot. Yum.
This strikes me as... not being in good faith.
"I thought Pop Tarts would prevent cancer" is silly.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/03/05/p...
This is especially obvious when you consider their other flavors. Imagine the alternative HN title "Law Firm Sues Kellogg for Not Enough S'Mores in S'Mores Pop-Tarts".
This is only because you have become accustomed to industrial food production practices. Because you've been tricked early in life and learned that 'strawberry' doesn't mean the berry and you've just normalized this practice.
If you ever do any cooking of your own you'll know that things like Strawberry Jam is made from taking a pot of strawberries and adding other ingredients. It very clearly is not taking 1 strawberry and adding a pot of strawberry like flavorings.
The real issue is we have crappy consumer protection laws. Companies should be forced to provide truthful advertising practices. E.g. 'Simulated Strawberry Flavor Poptarts' (don't hide the simulated label in tiny print that nobody notices until after the purchase). Another major problem is downsizing packaging, e.g. Orange Juice in a standard size container that is filled only to 90% capacity.
I could probably grab a box of pop tarts of whatever flavor I have in my pantry and check the ingredients list, but I'm pretty sure that it won't be misleading to any reasonable person.
And yes by analogy if I buy 'ground beef' I know it will be 100% ground beef because we have laws ensuring that is the case. However if I buy Shepards Pie & the packaging in large, bold text informs me that it is made with beef, I have to spend 60 seconds checking the packaging for small print that tells me the beef is actually 98% soy and 2% beef then I feel that's misleading.
As a consumer I don't know why one is protected while the other isn't, but I've learned through buying really bad products that I need to spend 60 seconds checking the packaging because some companies are fine hiding the truth.
So really the suit is about truth in advertising and exposing that we have a very low bar to be honest in consumer products.
I totally agree that "made with X!" adverts when X is actually 1% of the final product are misleading and should be illegal (maybe they are already, and it's just not enforced well?) - but I do think there's a difference between describing flavor and ingredients, and poptarts are pretty obviously the former.
How could a competitor benefit from using an honest quantity of real strawberries, if the only place they can effectively advertise that is in the tiny ingredients list that nobody reads?
"Filling made from 100% real strawberries!"
Already a common marketing construction, even. Apple juice is often sold with this bit of puffery.
Food labelling laws need an overhaul. And some serious teeth.
That statement says the strawberries are 100% real, it does nothing to exclude the addition of other ingredients or artificial red flavoring added elsewhere.
You may think I'm being asinine, but I'm not. I've been fooled by that language before.
"To me" being a native English speaker who has grown up in a culture where "strawberry" means a strawberry hasn't ever been within ten miles of that box of pop tarts? I mean, is that how far we've come? Just assume that what's literally printed on the box is a scam?
The frequency with which things without significant amounts of X but with some X-based or simulating flavor are labelled “X-flavored Y” rather than “X Y” suggests that it is not at all obvious or standard usage that the latter means the same as the former.
OTOH, mandatory food labelling laws are spotty on where they concretely prohibit the latter labelling.
On the gripping hand, the effect od the aggregate of those laws is important in shaping the context in which the package at issue is read.
It would be more akin to them advertising specific ingredients in S’Mores but the food stuffs not resembling S’mores in any form. It’s not as good an example as advertising strawberry but selling a predominately apple/pear artificially coloring it like strawberry. What’s the purpose of all this bait and switch? Allegedly so they can charge more than for apple/pear pop tarts.
The article talks about proper labeling and marketing, which is all well and good, but then, isn't that the jurisdiction of the FDA?
This seems like a waste of time, but I guess if you file 2-3 $5MM lawsuits per week, you're bound to eventually win one of them. It just shows ways to exploit this legal system, I suppose.
Now that's just marketing I know but at some point it's a lie. How many strawberries? How close to the poptart do you have to wave them?
I keep hoping that somebody will push back on this sort of lawsuit, by asking the court to appoint a trustee or conservator to manage the life of the plaintiff - because clearly they are not capable of understanding the Real World(tm) well enough to do that themselves.
This strikes me as... not being in good faith.
Clearly you didn’t read the Complaint, only this article which is written on behalf of the food industry and an obvious attempt to publicly attack both a singled out woman that is part of a class of plaintiffs and the law firm representing the plaintiff. It’s the same reason to this day people talk negatively about a woman suing McDonald’s and winning $1M after being burned by hot coffee, because McDonald’s sought to mock her claims publicly and it is a successful tactic. It’s hardly ever mentioned the McDonald’s in question purposely served coffee significantly hotter than industry standards permit, failed to attach the lid to her coffee resulting in 3rd degree burns to her crotch area requiring skin graphs, and was only required to pay he a single days worth of coffee sales.
Just look at the bs title of the article, “law firm sues…”. Then the very first sentence charges the law firm with being a “litigious law firm.”
What a joke, a law firm isn’t suing Kellogg, a law firm represents plaintiffs in a class action law suit (which is rare because it requires overcoming a legal burden of certifying the class). It’s this class of plaintiffs suing Kellogg not a “litigious law firm.”
The lawsuit, in addition to damages, is seeking the product be properly labeled. While the truth about Kellogg selling shit products to consumers may be obvious to you (and will ironically be one of their defenses), Kellogg’s labels are allegedly below the industry standard of competing toaster pastries that make disclosures of the artificial fillers. So it’s maybe not so ridiculous this woman and class of plaintiffs thought a strawberry pop tart might include the health benefits of…strawberries. After all if they didn’t then pop tart could have easily labeled their product the same way as all the other strawberry toaster pastries. It’s a far cry away from trying to paint a single plaintiff of a class action lawsuit as a wacko that thinks pop tarts prevents cancer, but hey it’s why these anti-plaintiff articles are written by industry, corporations advertise and mislabel products to begin with…it works on people.
The claimed harm in this case is they wouldn't have paid $4 for Pop Tarts if they'd realized they were less healthy.
(Yes, I read the complaint.)
If you actually read the complaint then you wouldn’t try comparing the damages resulting from a negligence case and this case for:
1. Violation of the NY consumer statue act;
2. Negligent misrepresentation;
3. Breach of implied merchantability; and
4. Unjust enrichment.
Also please cite from the complaint exactly where you got you initial quotation that the plaintiffs “thought pop tarts would prevent cancer.” Or why you would have made that up after reading the complaint?
As some others have mentioned, expecting any sort of health benefit from an ultra-processed candy is pretty ridiculous.
Though I'd also love if Kellogg were dragged across the coals for selling candy to children for breakfast.
Yeah. Pop-Tarts are my go-to example for my rule of "if you eat something unhealthy it should taste correspondingly good enough to make up for the hit to health". They fail it, badly. They're unhealthy and don't taste nearly good enough to make up for it.
Why don't we agree to call it what it actually is 'Red Flavor Poptarts' and then the suit can be dismissed.
BUT, the strawberry topping from your frozen foods section will likely be 3 strawberries sliced up large enough so the consumer thinks it's just like homemade because they see the fruit, and then a 98% of industrial red flavoring.
There is very little incentive not to use strawberry flavor because both products can be sold as the same. Would it really be so wrong to require more honesty in what we buy? When choosing a product wouldn't it be nice to choose between one with 98% red flavor versus one with 98% strawberry?
This case sounds like people wanting a free upgrade.
Don't you see that is the problem? We have trademark laws to protect companies from confusing consumers. E.g. If a cola company comes even close to confusing a consumer that their product is 'coke' then it gets sued.
However, when consumers are routinely confused by what's in a product or have become so accustomed that the picture on the box is not actually what is in the box then this audience seems to think that is okay.
I find the difference in opinions between business protection and consumer protection astounding. We've been massively propagandized by capitalism.
If the filling is 2% strawberry proteins, which is the not water and sugar part of the berry that actually tastes like strawberries, then that’s more than real strawberries.
IANAL. Is there any way for courts to take action against law firms who repeatedly sue frivolously, in the US or beyond?
While this is technically true, it obscures the reality of the matter. I doubt that woman woke up that day and decided in earnest she wanted to sue Kellogs over a poptart.
What likely happened is that Sheehan & Associates decided they wanted to try their hand at a class action lawsuit on the matter.
They need an actual plaintiff for doing that, just one person who, they will argue in court, is representative of anyone who ever bought a pop tart. They're not allowed to just solicit that person directly, so what they'll do is claim that they are "investigating the lack of strawberries in pop tart" and advertise heavily asking for help in their "investigation".
Once they get someone in their office or on the phone, it's easy to lead them towards the filing of a lawsuit (for which they can get paid).
The article does an unusually good job at showing scepticism over what is clearly lawyer-led and not plaintiff-led litigation, down to the title: "law firm sues".
Someone at a law firm deciding that "hey, we could make a lot of money suing Kellogg, now let's go find a reason to do it" is not what I'd consider an appropriate use of the legal system.
Ideally we'd have a consumer protection group that would have raised the issue decades ago. But, it seems a vast majority of Americans don't trust government to regulate and elect officials that weaken these institutions. Instead they favor letting market do it, and that's how we got here.
Here's a photo from the box in my pantry: https://i.imgur.com/5p4RvHD.jpeg
Anybody who actually believes that eating unfrosted strawberry Pop Tarts, with 190 calories, 12g of added sugar, 180mg of sodium and 3g of saturated fat in each pastry, is going to be good for cardiovascular health and guard against cancer should be laughed out of court and ordered to complete a basic nutrition course.
whole wheat flour, sugar, corn syrup, enriched flour, dextrose, soybean and palm oil, bleached wheat flour, polydextrose, glycerin. contains 2% or less of fructose, wheat starch, calcium carbonate, salt, leavening, vegetable juice for color, dried pears, dried apples, dried strawberries, sodium stearoyl lactylate, citric acid, modified wheat starch, datem, cornstarch, gelatin, xanthan gum, brown rice syrup, paprika extract color, soy lecithin, vitamin a palmitate, niacinamide, reduced iron, vitamin b6 (pyridoxine hydrochloride), vitamin b2 (riboflavin), vitamin b1 (thiamin hydrochloride).
Less than 2% contains any fruit at all, and there's more salt than fruit in that 2%. Her lawsuit seems focused on the fact that there's more pear and apples than strawberries, which seems irrelevant given how little fruit is present at all.
2% of a 48g Pop Tart is less than a gram, an average strawberry weighs 25g. She could slice up a single strawberry and eat a sliver each day for a month and consume more strawberry than she'd get by eating a Pop Tart each day.
Dried fruit is drastically more concentrated than fresh fruit. By weight, fruits are largely water.
"2% or less" means each individual ingredient is under that threshold, not the sum of them.
"2% or less" also means that the following ingredients do not necessarily need to be ordered by weight.
Even if they are listed by weight, there are three dried fruits and only one salt. The sum of their weights could easily outweigh the salt.
See § 101.4 (2):
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2006-title21-vol2/xm...
Wouldn't be surprised if Kellogg's used a defense premised on people's low expectations of processed foods. Similar to how FoxNews hosts use defenses along the lines of "people know we don't tell the truth".
- https://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-was...
We don't have to get started on the effect putting two private organizations in charge of all high-level narrative since the 70s has done, but I fail to see how any of that excuses deceptively rigging a primary.
The same year saw the GOP hold a similar dislike for a particular candidate, with different results. Trump won, but the RNC certainly tried their best to prevent it for a while. No party primary in history is likely to have been entirely fair or impartial.
EDIT: I want to clarify my response here. There's a trend within technology to discount anything that's based on social rather than some sort of more directly measurable outcome. In this case, the implication that there should be "rules" that are clear and followed to the letter, and absolutely nothing should happen outside of them.
Guess what! We live in a society, and anything involving more than one person also involves "politics". Social currency is as important, and one should pay attention to it. Otherwise one will consistently find that, no matter how good their technical justifications, they just get steamrolled by people who are both technically-correct enough AND socially juiced.
Selling pop tarts to everyone claiming something is in it that provides health benefits when it is hardly there is a different thing.
The DNC is allowed to be deceptive, if they want. There's no legal basis for "the primaries have to be fair". The party is permitted to express a preference; they get to choose a platform, rules for the convention, how many debates to have, etc. They can favor a specific candidate, they can expel you from the party, they can do all sorts of things to move the scale.
There's no legal basis for "strawberry Pop-Tarts need more than 2% strawberry". The company is permitted to use cancerous dyes and cheap ingredients, market the shit as wholegrain or whatever, etc.
The more I think about this, the more uncanny how similar our politics is to Pop-Tarts. They've no value or benefit to anyone but shareholders; they're marketed as responsible and balanced despite literally causing cancer; there's a few different flavours but the flavour is a meaningless deception dyed either red or blue.
A party running their own primaries is not at all like selling pop tarts.
1. It is standard practice at dismissal phase to proceed is if the plaintiff’s claims were correct.
2. The case was dismissed because political rhetoric is not enforceable in court.
The number and of strawberries going into a pastry is a lot easier to measure as a fact, and advertising that makes claims about strawberry content in the course of trade is not so protected.
Yeah that's not this. I'm referring to people like Tucker Carlson who--in order to defend himself against charges of slander--essentially used the defense that he's known to lie/exaggerate, thus people know not to believe him.[0]
Would be akin to Kellogg's defending with, "people know processed foods are garbage".
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
Edit: Here's the ad I had in mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlqFplfTojA
And here's an article form the case they presented the defense that no one would think it's healthy: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-dark-side-of-vitaminw_b_6...
We've all been told to eat more fruits and veggies, so isn't this a healthier choice?
Seems like a food that is mainly flour, sugar, sugar, sugar, preservatives and some filler / jam (sugar).