Food ads are in the crosshairs as Burger King, others face lawsuits for false advertising
Food ads have long made their subjects look bigger, juicier and crispier than they are in real life
Food ads have long made their subjects look bigger, juicier and crispier than they are in real life. But some consumers say those mouthwatering ads can cross the line into deception, and that’s leading to a growing number of lawsuits.
Burger King is the latest company in the crosshairs. In August, a federal judge in Florida refused to dismiss a class action lawsuit that claims Burger King’s ads overstate the amount of meat in its Whopper burger and other sandwiches.
But Burger King is far from the only one. Perkins Coie, a law firm that tracks class action suits, said 214 were filed against food and beverage companies in 2022 and 101 were filed in the first six months of this year. That’s a huge increase from 2010, when just 45 were filed.
Pooja Nair, who represents food and beverage companies as a partner with the Beverly Hills, California-based law firm Ervin Cohen and Jessup, said waves of class action lawsuits started hitting federal courts a few years ago.
Some of the first were false advertising claims against chip makers for not completely filling the bags; most of those were dismissed, she said. Since 2019, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed asserting that consumers are being misled by “vanilla-flavored” products that don’t contain pure vanilla or vanilla beans.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys largely file the cases in the same courts in New York, California and Illinois, she said, where federal courts are less likely to dismiss them outright.
While the case against Burger King was filed in Miami, where its parent company has its U.S. headquarters, one of the attorneys who filed it has similar cases pending in New York
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