LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) – Class action lawyers have 14 days to fix their lawsuit against three major producers of chocolate products, a federal judge has ruled.
Judge Cormac Carney on July 29 granted the motions to dismiss of Starbucks, Mars Wrigley and Quaker Oats – three companies facing claims customers would be misled about their anti-slavery positions by their packaging.
Lori Myers’ lawsuit says the companies put labels on their products that would lead customers to believing the chocolate is produced ethically despite a history of child and slave labor and deforestation in the harvesting of cocoa in West Africa.
Judge Carney ruled against all of her arguments and gave her 14 days to amend her complaint. As to allegations regarding Starbucks’ COCOA certification program, he wrote:
“Plaintiff identifies only one specific problem with the COCOA program: it ‘consists solely of mandating verification organizations to audit farms’ and these verification organizations are ‘trained and audited by another global organization, SCS Global Services, and not by Starbucks itself.’
“The Court fails to understand why Starbucks’s use of third parties makes the COCOA program a sham. Plaintiff then falls back on generalized allegations about industry-wide problems and attempts to shift the burden to Starbucks to substantiate the success of the COCOA program.”
The complaint also took issue with the Mars relying on the Rainforest Alliance to help it find cocoa harvested ethically. On Dove dark chocolate bars, Mars puts “We buy cocoa from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms, traceable from the farms into our factory.”
“Mars’ packaging simply does not make any claims about the labor practices of its suppliers or the scope of the Rainforest Alliance program,” Carney wrote.
Myers is represented by Schonbrun Seplow Harris and Hoffman in Los Angeles and Harris Hoffman and Zeldes in San Diego.