CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) – TGI Friday’s is passing off less-healthy cheddar cheese as mozzarella in its bagged snacks, a class action lawsuit says.
Filed Feb. 5 in Illinois’ Cook County Chancery Court, Amy Joseph’s lawsuit against TFI Friday’s and Inventure Foods says the restaurant-branded mozzarella sticks, distributed by Inventure to stores, do not contain any mozzarella at all.
“Instead, the mozzarella sticks contain cheddar cheese,” the lawsuit says. “In addition to defying the commonsense proposition that a food called ‘mozzarella sticks’ would contain mozzarella cheese, the mozzarella sticks’ labeling runs afoul of several of the (Food and Drug Administration’s) regulations…”
The label on the cheese sticks “is silent as to the absence” of mozzarella, the suit says.
“Had Plaintiff and class members known the truth… they would not have been willing to purchase them at all,” the suit says. “Indeed, mozzarella cheese is the defining ingredient in mozzarella sticks, such that the substitution of another type of cheese in place of mozzarella cheese renders the mozzarella sticks an entirely different product…”
The class is represented by Thomas Zimmerman and other lawyers at Chicago’s Zimmerman Law Offices. They hope to have a better outcome than other lawyers had when they tried to sue TGI Friday’s and Inventure Foods over “potato skin” snacks that didn’t contain potato skins.
Inventure settled the individual plaintiff’s false advertising claims but never progressed to a point in which a class was certified. TGI Friday’s was dismissed as a defendant because it merely sold its name as branding to Inventure.