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Area noshers sue when they learn Utz potato chips aren't 'all natural'
By adamg on Thu, 01/01/2015 - 10:47am
From the complaint: Just look at those bags!
In its latest product-labeling lawsuit, Boston law firm Mirabella Law has found a pair of area consumers who claim they never would have eaten "all natural" Utz potato chips if they'd known the snacks were made with oils based on genetically-modified vegetables and with such "unnatural" ingredients as maltodextrin and citric acid.
The lawsuit, filed earlier this week in US District Court in Boston, seeks to have Boston resident Matt DiFrancesco and Medford resident Angela Mizzoni made lead plaintiffs in a class action suit that seeks more than $5 million in damages for everybody across the country who will no doubt will be similarly disgusted, under federal and Massachusetts product-labeling laws.
The lawsuit claims that genetically modified food is unnatural and makes the claim that because some Utz products including Utz Potato Chips Baby Back Rib, contain cottonseed, corn, canola and/or soy oil and that therefore, they have to be made with genetically modified ingredients since "91% of cotton, 89% of corn, 90% of rapeseed and 94% of soybeans grown in the United States is genetically modified."
Defendant's "All Natural" representations are deceptive, false, misleading, and unfair to consumers who are injured in fact by purchasing Products that Defendant claims are "All Natural" when the Products actually contain ingredients made from GM cottonseed, corn, rapeseed and soybeans and, thus, are not all natural.
But just in case a judge thinks genetically-modified foodstuffs are fine, the suit continues:
Cottonseed Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil and Canola Oil are heavily-processed cooking oils and are not natural. ... Cottonseed, corn, soybean and canola oil typically undergo several distinct chemical processes: (1) hexane extraction; (2) chemical refining; (3) bleaching; (4) deodorizing; and (5) conditioning.
And don't even get them started on the way the vinegar Utz uses is processed.
Over the past four years, DiFrancesco purchased Utz Potato Chips Regular, Utz Restaurant Style Tortillas Chips and Bachman MultiGrain Tortilla Chips at a Boston Shaw's. "He relied on the “All Natural” representations in making his purchase decisions," the suit says.
Mizzoni was a fan of Utz Select Pretzels Honey Wheat Braided Sticks, Utz Salsa Chunky Medium, Utz Baked Potato Chips Original and Bachman Pretzels Rolled Rods, which she bought at the Reading Market Basket.
The Products that Ms. Mizzoni received were worth less than the products for which she paid. By purchasing products in reliance on advertising that is false, Ms. Mizzoni has suffered injury in fact and lost money as a result of the unfair business practices alleged here.
In recent months, Mirabella has filed similar product-labeling lawsuits against Duracell, New Whey Nutrition, Dole, Blue Diamond, Coca-Cola and Whole Foods.
Complete complaint (4.7M PDF).
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Comments
I'm going to retain this law
I'm going to retain this law firm so I can sue all garbanzo bean producers for selling me a product that is neither a chick nor a pea.
(Apologies to Church Lady)
Wrong character
I believe you mean Linda Richman from "Coffee Talk."
Opportunistic
Hey, if people are going to file ridiculous lawsuits, I see no problem in getting some money out of huge corporations myself. There are TONS of these things that you can sign up for without needing proof of purchase or anything and then they mail you a check:
http://scrapingbyinboston.blogspot.com/2013/10/class-action-suits-for-fu...
I miss Winslow potato chips..
I miss Winslow potato chips........
Fun link, a double treat...
https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720...
The Utz stuff is generally pretty crappy
The lawsuit should be thrown out on the basis that the plaintiffs have no taste.
Good for them
Good. I applaud the plaintiffs. I hope they put Utz out of business and get rich off their settlement. People laugh and scoff at the whole GMO thing like it's some kind of joke, but did you ever think about why there are so many more fatasses and cancer victims in the USA now as compared to back in the 70s before pretty much everything we eat had GMO ingredients? Recently I looked at my old elementary school class pictures from the early 80s. There was one fat kid. My niece's elementary school class pic from this year is about 85% little fatties. Before and after GMOs were silently made a staple of the American diet. People need to wake up and realize how crazy it is that society has unwittingly accepted poisons added to the food supply.
Lack of physical activity
Lack of physical activity in daily life has a huge impact on this. Gym is being cut in a lot of schools, recess limited to 10 minutes a day or eliminated (every last second has to be college prep!), lunch times cut to 10 or 15 minutes (shovel it in kids - gotta go sit some more!) and schools prohibiting parents from letting kids walk to and from school (too dangerous! parents can't make that call!)
Kids in the lower grades typically have an hour or more of homework when they get home, too, and parents in some places have had child welfare visits for letting kids as old as nine play outside in their own yards (child molesters are everywhere all the time!!!!) despite the actual risk of stranger abductions being very very low.
This all adds up to fat kids.
Wrong Strategy?
I share your views on GMO and processed foods, but can't see the point of going after relatively small manufacturers in individual lawsuits against single products. Not likely to make a significant impact on how most processed foods are manufactured, which suggests the law firm is more interested in profit (via settlements), as opposed to policy changes that might occur if they pursued class action against Big Food, or lobbied for government regulation.
Smallness does not diminish FALSE ADVERTISING
but your class action suit is a good idea. WHOLE FOODS has stopped selling non-GMO soymilk in favor of their own brand, too.
Totally not about the money
Cause that just sounds like a good way for Whole Foods to get even more money, selling their own branded product.
Agreed - our food is in terrible condition. However ...
I don't believe that Utz has made the claim that their chips and pretzels are not genetically modified. That doesn't mean that the potatoes they use aren't all-natural. Their ingredients are chemically modified -- it's not called processed food for nothing, but I don't see the FDA coming down on Utz for labeling inaccuracies.
Semantics, to be sure, but it's an important legal distinction.
Something has changed
"did you ever think about why there are so many more fatasses and cancer victims in the USA now as compared to back in the 70s "
When I was young in the 60s, every kid in my class wold have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch quite frequently. High in calories maybe, but we used to burn it off with general physical activity. Now if you go anywhere near a school with a peanut, all the kids practically drop dead with allergic reactions. Where did that suddenly come from? Not to mention everyone suddenly being physically intolerant to gluten. When all that first started arising out of nowhere in recent years I originally thought "what a bunch of whiners, just looking for one more fake disease to be sick and complain about". But then I realized it was a legitimate concern and the cause had to be from the way the food is produced.
Um no,
Um no,
Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder caused by a faulty gene, The ANCIENT FRICKEN GREEKS NOTICED IT and it wasn't until kids were starving during WWII that some doctor noticed the connection between not eating wheat and the afflicted children suddenly getting better.
The reason why the rate of diagnosis of Celiac Disease and general gluten intolerance has gone up is a combination of:
1,) Understanding it isn't a childhood disease people grow out of.
2.) A large number of middle aged and elderly people dying of GI related cancers and suffering from GERD disorders really have CD which is causing their own immune systems to destroy their innards.
3,) An accurate blood test for it which did not exist 10 years ago
4.) The gluten content of food from the hybridization of wheat and cross contamination of food processing has gone up dramatically in the past 50 years. So the more rapid rate of exposure leads to the more rapid onset of symptoms which previously would have took years to show up.
Poison in food supply? What
Poison in food supply? What are you taking about?
Coincidence
How many kids play in their neighborhoods? Play organized sports? Have PE in school? Have a full recess period? Get fast food for dinner every night? Eat a diet saturated in fat, sugar, and salt?
Many of the GMO proteins were in use before your arbitrary deadline of the 70s. They were just sprayed on the outside instead of more efficiently produced inside of the plant. But you don't care about that. You have your boogie man like the vaccine autism linkers.
You've turned coincidence to causation and nobody's going to convince you that you are incorrect.
Good lord
'poisons'?
Fact # 1: Cancer rates are actually dropping:
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@research/documents/document/ac...
Fun fact # 2- either we can have more starving people as the world population grows (prior to leveling off in @ 40 years) or we can have crops which can succeed in expanding the productivity and scope of arable land. Organic farming is much more resource intensive than conventional farming- more water, more energy used, more carbon emissions, etc...
Seriously?
The American Cancer Society? OK bruh. You can call me crunchy or stupid or whatever, but are never going to see eye to eye on this. Good luck.
http://www.naturalnews.com/American_Cancer_Society.html
Here's some more facts
http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html
Breast cancer rates unchanged and deaths dropping.
http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/breast.html
prostate cancer rates dropping a lot. according to the NIH.
Enjoy your non-GMO food - try not to force folks in the third world to starve though OK?
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-12/acs-mt1123014.php
So to be clear, you're claiming that the ACS is what, cooking up these statistics over a twenty year span? that actually more people are dying of cancer than 'the man' is reporting or something?
Using Natural News as a source of health information
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and founder of that website is a joke. Whenever I see someone reference his site as if it's a legitimate source of information, I automatically disqualify the post in my head.
For one thing, he's an vaccine causes autism guy. He also thinks that supplements can cure mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. I see one of the top psych doctors in the city who also happens to do research in the field. You might think he's a tool of big pharma but I believe him when he says that the prescription that has kept me stable for about 10 years is a good thing.
Supplemental Irony
The irony is that lithium carbonate, a principal and breakthrough drug for bipolar disorder, was itself the subject of an act of congress because it was not patentable as a naturally occurring substance. The ancients knew to send their manics off to certain spas where the waters were therapeudic.
Whenever you see a "nututional" approach to bipolar disorder, consider that irony. (well, that and their references to lithium as "an element used to make batteries" when its origin in drinking water isn't "natural" enough for them)
Also note that giving someone multiple megadoses of intravenous vitamin D is neither nutritional nor natural ... ugh! This was recommended as a "natural" treatment for Ebola.
Give me a break
Anybody else find it ironic and/or convenient that a person who enjoys eating potato chips is suddenly concerned with their health and what ingredients are used in the junk foods they consume?
They are concerned
When it comes to money.
Does Ben Edelman work for them?
These kind of suits seem right up his alley.
Bound to fail
Horizontal gene transfer occurs naturally. Especially between synergistic relationships like between bacteria that kill predator pests and plants. In fact, if it weren't for a natural gene transfer millennia ago, plants wouldn't have become land-based leaving their water-based cousins behind and you wouldn't be here.
All GMO scientists do is hand-select which gene is transferred from one organism to another. If you allow for the farmer to select which corn from this year's crop is going to be used to replant next year's crop, you have allowed for the same thing to potentially occur. You are allowing the hand-selection of a specific set of genes to propagate at the expense of all other possibilities that turned up that year. Any one of those crops selected by the farmer may have been the result of a horizontal gene transfer unbeknownst to you. You would have just been oblivious to the fact that the crop had a better yield due to a bacterial pesticide gene being donated to that corn's genome..so to you, the new corn plant was just "lucky" to be better and keep more pests away. In reality, it's the same as any GMO...in fact it would be more dangerous since you would have had no knowledge or control of what was transferred. The scientist only transferred what is absolutely necessary and tested it to be sure. The farmer tests his next year's crop by seeing if anyone dies as a result of eating this new more robust corn he's producing.
But back to the point of the lawsuit. "All-natural" must include horizontal gene transfer events as that is something that occurs naturally between bacteria and plants. The lawsuit is not grounded in science or reality. QED.
With a minute of internet
With a minute of internet research you'll find that 'all natural' has no agreed-upon/shared definition. If something were stamped USDA organic and it used GMO ingredients - then you'd have a case.
While we all probably wish that food labels weren't so complicated - the 'all natural' label and what it means is simply a marketing scam to play off of people's interest in organic foods. While I'm super anti-GMO - the fault here is with the consumer.
Most importantly...
Most importantly (because that's what this all comes down to), there is no legal definition.
Natural Ingredients can Kill
Arsenic is naturally occurring
So are snake venom, lead, cadmium,cyanide, formaldehyde ...
I'm shocked...
you mean to tell me that a Baby Back Rib Potato Chips are NOT all natural?
Damn!
Ingredients
These are the ingredients on their baby back rib chips:
Potatoes, cottonseed oil, sugar, salt, dextrose, maltodextrin (derived from corn), vinegar powder (maltodextrin, vinegar and modified food starch [derived from corn]), onion powder, molasses, tomato powder, spices, torula yeast, citric acid, yeast extract, malic acid, oleoresin paprika, natural flavors (including hickory smoke), garlic powder
That's about as all natural as you can get compared to a lot of crap out there.
Flavour
most of that crap is your flavoring. Ingredients on the regular bag of chips: Potatoes, cottonseed oil, and salt.
http://www.getutz.com.php53-16.ord1-1.websitetestlink.com/get-snacks/pot...
Should read
In the latest frivilous lawsuit brought by people too lazy to actually read ALL of the label.
benji Edelman should be hot
benji Edelman should be hot on the case
New Tech Square Winter Farmers' Market?
What have you kind folks found at the new Tech Square 11-2 Wednesdays Winter Farmers' Market?
http://www.kendallsq.org/event/winter-farmers-market-2/2015-01-07/
Vincent's Potato Chips
were the best. Can you still find these anywhere?