LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) - Having settled her slave labor claims against Starbucks, a woman is now appealing the dismissal of similar arguments she made against Mars Wrigley Confectionary and The Quaker Oats Company.
Lori Myers on Oct. 5 filed her notice of appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals to the Ninth Circuit, more than a year after a Los Angeles federal judge dismissed parts of her proposed class action lawsuit.
In September, she reached a confidential settlement with Starbucks before a class was certified. Her litigation alleges the three companies misled consumers about how ethically sourced the cocoa for its chocolate products was.
Her case alleged the companies bought cocoa produced by child and slave labor.
"Mars' statement is carefully worded," Judge John Holcomb wrote on May 5, 2021. "Mars claims that it buys beans 'traceable from the farms into our factories' - not that it buys only traceable beans.
"Mars' claim is technically true: Mars does buy traceable beans. It is just that Mars may also buy nontraceable beans - a fact that Mars, understandably, declines to advertise. But Mars has not affirmatively misrepresented its purchases."
Quaker Oats' claim it "supports sustainably sourced cocoa through Cocoa Horizons," was true, Holcomb wrote, rejecting Myers' theory that reasonable consumers were fooled because Cocoa Horizons does not achieve meaningful results.
These are the rejections Myers and her lawyers at Schonbrun Seplow are appealing.
Starbucks wasn't as fortunate as it co-defendants, though.
The challenged statement was that Starbucks labels its hot chocolate as “made with ethically sourced cocoa.” Her first complaint claimed Starbucks’ COCOA verification program was “a sham,” but the court rejected that.
“Rather than dig up additional facts about the COCOA program or Starbucks’ environmental impact, Myers has retooled her argument: because ‘no company, including Starbucks,’ can claim slave-free chocolate, a reasonable consumer would be misled by chocolate advertised as ‘ethically sourced.’”
Plaintiffs lawyers say about 2 million children are forced to labor on cocoa farms in West Africa and that they harvest most of the cocoa that Americans consume.
Cocoa production in West Africa also drives deforestation there, they say, which all contradict claims cocoa is “ethically sourced.”
“Myers has alleged sufficient facts to clear this hurdle at the Rule 12(b)(6) state,” Holcomb wrote.
“Myers has alleged that child slavery is endemic to the chocolate trade; that it is difficult or impossible to product chocolate without labor from child slaves; that a reasonable consumer is sensitive to these concerns and would consider ethically made chocolate and reliance on child slavery mutually exclusive; and that Starbucks claims that its hot chocolate is made from ethically sourced cocoa.”