PORTLAND, Ore. (Legal Newsline) – If she wanted to know if “Just Fruit” jam was made of just fruit, she should have read the label, Kroger says in defending itself from a proposed class action lawsuit.
Sarah Vitort and her lawyers at Piucci Law, Milstein Jackson and Casey Law Firm filed the case Aug. 6 in Oregon federal court. It claims the “Just Fruit” line of Kroger jams are primarily made with fruit syrup and other sweeteners.
That shouldn’t be news to customers, Kroger says in a Nov. 5 motion to dismiss.
“This fundamental act was plainly advertised on the product’s label, confirmed by the ingredient disclosures and readily observable to Ms. Vitort prior to her purchase,” the motion says.
“Ms. Vitort cannot impose classwide liability against the grocers based on her subjective, implausible and unreasonable reading of the grocers’ ‘just fruit’ description.”
The motion cites a 2015 ruling in a similar case in which the judge wrote “One can hardly walk down the aisles of a supermarket without viewing large pictures depicting vegetable or fruit flavors, when the products themselves are largely made up of a different base ingredient. Every reasonable shopper knows that the devil is in the details.”
The class action says reasonable consumers have paid more for a product they expected to be made solely out of fruit than they would have if they had known the jam contained other ingredients.
“Ms. Vitort cannot manufacture consumer confusion based on her subjective expectations regarding the type and form of fruit that the product should contain,” Kroger’s lawyers wrote.