Maybe You Shouldn't Judge A Juice By Its Label, Alamilla et al. v. Hain Celestial Group, Inc., et al. Case No. 3:!3-cv-05595-VC (Judge Vince Chhabria)

Ever wonder whether your "organic" beverage is truly "organic" and worth the $5 premium? That question was raised by a complaint alleging false advertising and unfair competition against Hain Celestial Group and its subsidiary BluePrint Wholesale—maker of BluePrintJuice and BluePrintCleanse fruit and vegetable drinks. The complaint alleged BluePrint deliberately mislabeled and falsely advertised its juices as "100% Raw," "Raw," and "Organic" and misled "health-conscious consumers" into purchasing BluePrint's juices at a $5 to $7 premium. Unfortunately for plaintiffs, however, Judge Chhabria pressed their claims out of existence after defendants moved to dismiss the complaint with prejudice.

The lawsuit stems from what the plaintiffs characterize as "raw foodism," a dietary movement focused on the consumption of raw and uncooked foods for their health benefits. The plaintiffs alleged that BluePrint labeled and advertised its vegetable and fruit juices, "100% Raw," "Raw," and "Organic," and "Never Heated" and represented that "BluePrint uses pressure instead of heat to keep our beverages fresh, raw and safe." According to the plaintiffs, contrary to BluePrint's representations, its juices undergo a "High Pressure Pasteurization" ("HPP") process that neutralizes the vitamins, nutrients, and live enzymes associated with "uncooked" juices and leaves the juices with the same nutritional value as less healthy cooked and pasteurized foods.

As part of their complaint, the plaintiffs attached two articles discussing the effects of HPP processes on foods: Eamonn Hogan et al. High Pressure Processing of Foods: An Overview, in Emerging Technologies for Food Processing 3, 27 (Da-Wen Sun ed., 2005) and Margaret F. Patterson et al., Introduction to High Pressure Processing of Foods, in Emerging Technologies for Food Processing 1, 9 (Christopher J. Doon et al. eds., 2007).

The defendants moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim, arguing—amongst other things—that the labels and advertisements were not misleading. In particular, the defendants relied on conclusions in the plaintiffs' articles, stating that the HPP processes BluePrint purportedly uses had less of an impact than pasteurization on a food's nutritional value.

Judge Chhabria acknowledged that "on their own, [the plaintiffs'] allegations state a plausible claim that the defendants' representations could lead a reasonable consumer to conclude incorrectly that pressure treatment does not deprive juice of its nutritional value in the same way the pasteurization does." Nevertheless, Judge Chhabria took notice of the plaintiffs' articles and found they "repeatedly make the point that pressurization has less impact on nutritional value than pasteurization." Accordingly, he concluded that the articles "thus contradict the allegation upon which their entire complaint hinges—namely, that pressure treatment deprives juice of nutritional value to a similar degree as pasteurization." Plaintiffs argued that the conclusions of the articles regarding pressurization were incorrect, but Judge Chhabria found that the plaintiffs were nonetheless bound by these conclusions due to their decision to attach the articles to the complaint.

This decision demonstrates that plaintiffs need to be careful about cooking up allegations that rely on attachments to a complaint. Even though plaintiffs get the benefit of notice pleading rule, they still may be bound by the raw disclosures in their attachments, which may lead to their claims getting sterilized at an early stage.

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