CHICAGO (Legal Newsline) - Calling eggs "farm-fresh" doesn't require their production by free-range hens, a federal judge has ruled in rejecting claims from a controversial class action lawyer.
Chicago judge Charles Kocoras on Aug. 6 granted Kroger's motion to dismiss the lawsuit of plaintiff Adam Sorkin and New York lawyer Spencer Sheehan, who has filed hundreds of consumer deception class actions over products at the grocery store.
One federal judge has called him "a wrecking ball." Judge Kocoras did not devote any of his 13-page ruling to Sheehan's business practices, instead addressing the merits of a claim that consumers understand "farm fresh" to mean hens are allowed to spread their wings on the farm.
The suit said customers believed hens were living "a natural life on a farm." And the chicken producing Kroger's eggs aren't living on what consumers would call a farm, but rather large-scale industrial confinement.
"But the term 'farm fresh' does not say or suggest anything about whether the eggs came from a hen that was caged or not," Kocoras wrote. "Sorkin is attempting to 'impute meaning that is not fairly derived from the labeling itself.'"
The plaintiff noted a study that 41% of 646 Kroger customers thought "farm fresh" meant "cage free."
"(T)he complaint fails to support a reasonable inference that a majority of reasonable consumers would be misled to believe that a statement not referencing the living conditions of the hens implicitly guarantees that the hens that produced the eggs were living on some sort of idyllic farm with a red barn, an abundance of hay, and hens frolicking in elysian green pastures," Kocoras wrote.
The issue has drawn interest from Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, whose office recently wrote a letter to SpartanNash reminding it that in 2025, Michigan law will prohibit the sale of eggs from caged hens.
Her office wrote Kroger in 2023 to urge it to "add clear signage to your stores to help consumers understand which eggs, exactly, came from caged chickens." The company announced in 2016 a switch to cage-free eggs by 2025 but squashed that in 2022, blaming slow industry progress and the need to keep egg costs down for consumers.
Nessel cited the same Data for Progress survey Sheehan did in his lawsuit. Kroger's granted motion to dismiss took aim at Sheehan, claiming he was putting words in its mouth.
"The problem here, as with the prior version of the same complaint (which Mr. Sheehan withdrew after he was served a Rule 11 motion), is that the label never makes ay such statement," the motion says.
"Mr. Sheehan and Mr. Sorkin are making it up. Again. This has become the nationwide modus operandi for Mr. Sorkin's counsel, and it is time to stop."
Sheehan is well-known in class action circles for the prolific amount of cases he has filed over novel theories of consumer deception that have sometimes angered judges. He's even been sued by one of his targets for naming it as defendant even though it had no connection to the case.