Hershey acquired a deal with Friday when a decide dismissed a lawsuit claiming the corporate’s Reese’s candies tricked clients by depicting spooky Halloween designs on their packaging, whereas the unwrapped sweets have been the truth is featureless.
U.S. District Choose Melissa Damian dominated Friday that the customers who filed the class-action lawsuit failed to indicate that the dearth of confectionary particulars on the chocolate and peanut butter candies, corresponding to lacking mouths and eyes on jack-‘o-lanterns, ghosts and different Halloween-themed figures, had trigger them financial hurt.
Damian identified that whereas the customers could have been dissatisfied by the sweets’ unwrapped appearances, the candies weren’t “so flawed as to render them worthless.” In different phrases, the chocolate nonetheless tasted like chocolate, even when they weren’t as haunting because the purchasers had anticipated from the packaging.
A 2024 lawsuit alleged Hershey had engaged in misleading promoting by depicting chocolate pumpkins with carved faces, when the unwrapped sweets have been clean. A decide dismissed the lawsuit on Sept. 19.
U.S. District Courtroom of Southern Florida
The lawsuit centered on a number of Hershey candies which can be marketed round Halloween, together with its Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins and its Reese’s White Ghost, in addition to a couple of different holiday-themed sweets like its Reese’s Peanut Butter Shapes Assortment Snowmen Stockings Bells.
The unique lawsuit, filed in 2024, claimed that Hershey used misleading promoting as a result of the “artistic designs” depicted on the wrappers have been absent from the precise candies.
A photograph of an unwrapped Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkin included in a 2024 lawsuit alleging misleading promoting over the distinction between the wrapper and the looks of the particular sweet.
U.S. District Courtroom of Southern Florida
However the distinction between the wrappers and the sweets’ precise appearances wasn’t sufficient to show “a concrete economic injury,” Damian wrote on Friday.
“Plaintiffs’ conclusory allegations as to why they have allegedly been deprived of the benefit of their bargain all boil down to their subjective, personal expectations of how the products would or should have looked when unpackaged,” the decide added.
Anthony Russo, an lawyer for the customers who sued Hershey, mentioned that they intend to amend the grievance.
He added, “We believe that companies should not be awarded with sales when they falsely represent the main characteristic of the product and only have to pay damages if it can be shown that the consumers paid a premium.”
Hershey didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Extra from CBS Information
