SAN DIEGO (Legal Newsline) – Nestle wants a federal judge to reconsider his ruling that allows a class action lawsuit over child and slave labor in the West African cocoa supply chain to continue.
Lorenz ruled March 28 that customers could have been misled by Nestle’s statements regarding its commitment to avoid using cocoa harvested by child and slave labor. The case, filed in May 2019, claims customers bought products based on labels that stated Nestle “supports farmers for better chocolate” and that the company was working to “help improve the lives of cocoa farmers.”
Nestle’s reconsideration motion says it has dedicated millions of dollars to the Nestle Cocoa Plan and was the first company to introduce a Child Labor Monitoring & Remediation System.
Nestle says it built or refurbished 49 schools, delivered school supply kits to 19,152 children and trained 157 groups of farmers on improved labor practices.
“All of these facts appeared in a document that the court expressly incorporated by reference, but none are mentioned in the court’s order denying Defendant’s motion to dismiss,” the motion for reconsideration says.
“The only statistic mentioned in the order relates to an increase in the total number of children monitored by the Cocoa Plan between 2017 and 2019. Because that figure was isolated from facts in the same document showing all that the Cocoa Plan has done, the Court credited Plaintiff’s erroneous assumption that an increase in the number of children being monitored must mean child labor problems have grown more severe under the Cocoa Plan, when in fact… the exact opposite is true.”
This “distorted reading of the data” helped the plaintiffs’ lawyers defeat Nestle’s motion to dismiss, the company says. If the reconsideration motion is not granted, it seeks permission to file an appeal.
Lorenz’s decision to allow the case to proceed benefited lawyers at Coast Law Group, Schonbrun Seplow and Reese LLP. He had initially tossed the case because the complaint wasn’t specific enough but allowed those lawyers to amend it.
When those lawyers included pictures of Nestle products with the allegedly misleading statements, they never said which, if any, were actually purchased by their client. An amended complaint did.
The case is one of many using California consumer protection laws to punish companies that buy cocoa from West Africa, where some cocoa plantations use child and slave labor.
“Plaintiff alleges Defendant knew that incidence of child labor increased since the inception of the Nestle Cocoa Plan,” Lorenz’s ruling says.
“The statements on Defendant’s products that the cocoa is ‘sustainably sourced’ based on the ‘Nestle Cocoa Plan,’ which is said to ‘help improve’ the lives of farmers and ‘support’ them, are at odds with the fact that the child labor problem the Nestle Cocoa Plan is said to address has grown more, and not less, severe.
“The addition of the UTZ certification enhances the advertising statements by suggesting they are true because they were approved by a third party.”