SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) - Companies facing false advertising claims in California federal courts have a recent Ninth Circuit decision to point to.
On June 9, The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled for Procter & Gamble in a lawsuit alleging shampoo-shoppers were misled by an avocado on the front of bottles of Pantene Pro-V Nature Fusion, as well as the term "nature fusion."
The victory should help all companies facing similar claims who, in their defense, stated the plaintiffs should have just read the ingredients label on the back of the products if they wanted to know what was in them.
In the P&G case, plaintiff Sean McGinity alleged the shampoo contained synthetic ingredients, though the avocado on the front would have shoppers believe otherwise.
"The front label of a product must be unambiguously deceptive for a defendant to be precluded from insisting that the back label of the product be considered together with the front label to defeat claims for violations of California's False Advertising Law, Unfair Competition Law, and Consumers Legal Remedies Act," the Ninth Circuit held.
The avocado label did not make any promise about what proportion of ingredients were natural "and could have meant any number of things about the products bearing some relationship to nature."
A Los Angeles federal judge had reached the same conclusion in a lawsuit over American-made tortillas that had a Mexican flag and Spanish phrases on the front. The back of the package told shoppers where the tortillas were made.
Campbell Soup Company hopes the P&G ruling helps its defense in a lawsuit that says its V8 juices are marketed to be healthy but instead contain more sugar than a shopper would think.