SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) – Reasonable consumers expecting 100% natural products could have been misled by S.C. Johnson & Son when it claimed its Ecover cleaning line is made with plant-based ingredients.
That’s the ruling of a San Francisco federal judge who on May 5 refused to grant the company’s motion to dismiss Elizabeth Maisel’s proposed class action over 14 Ecover products. The decision will allow plaintiffs lawyers at the Clarkson Law Firm and Moon Law to continue pursuing the case.
Magistrate judge Thomas Hixson denied all seven of S.C. Johnson’s arguments, notably that a reasonable consumer would not have been misled by its claims because he or she could read the ingredients list on the backs of the products and find whether they have synthetic materials in them.
S.C. Johnson says it never claimed its products were 100% natural, only that they were made with plant- and mineral-based ingredients.
“Given the weight of authority finding plausible similar plant-based representations and analogous representations, such as ‘naturally derived,’ the court finds Maisel’s allegations plausible under the reasonable consumer test,” Hixson wrote.
“(A)lthough the products do not make any objective representations about the amount of plant-based and mineral ingredients, it is plausible that a reasonable consumer could be deceived into thinking the products only contain ingredients that come from plants and/or from plants and minerals.”
Reasonable consumers are not expected to read the ingredients list, Hixson wrote, citing earlier cases.
Hixson also found Maisel has standing to sue over all 14 products despite only using one of them because the claims on each are so similar.
In a January lawsuit, lawyers targeted the Ecover line – which includes laundry detergent, dishwasher tablets and toilet cleaner.
The suit claimed ingredients like coconut and palm oil are subjected to “substantial chemical modification and processing that creates an entirely new, synthetically created ingredient.”