CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) – A serial plaintiff must have stolen her idea to file a lawsuit over TGI Friday’s-brand mozzarella stick snacks from someone else, the company argues in a recent motion to dismiss.
TGIF and Inventure Foods call out plaintiff Amy Joseph’s litigious past in their April 16 motion as they fight claims they tricked customers into buying a product labeled as mozzarella but built on cheddar cheese.
In the past 10 years, Joseph has filed at least eight class actions in Illinois state and federal courts. In her last three she has been represented by Zimmerman Law Offices of Chicago, which also sued over the TGIF-brand potato skin snacks.
Joseph says she bought six bags of mozzarella stick snacks from Amazon in January but was shocked to find out they were made with mostly cheddar.
“Considering Plaintiff’s proclivity for filing class action lawsuits, the timing of her alleged purchase of the subject product is particularly suspect as it was made approximately one month after a similar class action lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York,” the motion says. “That lawsuit also involves TGIF-brand mozzarella stick snacks.”
The motion criticizes other circumstances of the lawsuit, mostly its lack of specifics.
“Here, Plaintiff alleges that the subject product was ‘worthless’ due to the alleged absence of mozzarella, but there are no factual allegations to support this conclusory statement.
“Indeed, Plaintiff does not assert any allegations that the only ‘value’ in the subject product was from mozzarella cheese or how what she received was worth any less than what she expected to receive (whatever that may have been),” the motion says.
Inventure distributes the snacks, leading to its inclusion in the Feb. 5 lawsuit as a defendant. That the products contain no mozzarella runs afoul of Food and Drug Administration regulations, the suit says.
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 potato skin lawsuit alleged the product did not contain skins and was settled before progressing to a point in which a class was certified. TGIF was dismissed as a defendant because it merely sold its name as branding to Inventure.