Nowadays, it is true that you can’t even trust big companies when it comes to food products like butter. Take, for example, the Kerrygold Butter, where the company itself claimed that it was a pure Irish butter, but the reality turned out to be quite a different one, and that’s what ended up in this Kerry Gold Butter Lawsuit. Let’s talk about it a bit more then.
Who Makes Kerrygold Butter?
Kerrygold is an Irish butter brand that uses milk obtained from Irish dairy farms. The butter is shipped to many countries all over the world, including the States.
Ornua Foods North America is the company in charge of selling and distributing Kerrygold products in the U.S. The brand has gained a lot of fans due to its smooth texture and its very distinctive golden yellow color.
Marketing is also a major component of the Kerrygold brand. Other than just the shiny packaging, the company also got a lot of buyers’ attention by using phrases like “pure Irish butter” over and over again. You must have heard that at some point already.
Why Did Some Customers Feel Misled?
Some customers thought that the advertising text might be interpreted in a misleading manner. Most of the packaging focused on the concept of “grass-fed cows,” which made many customers believe that the cows had been fed only grass throughout the year.
Generally, in practice, the cows used for milk production are not the same as those used for beef. Although Irish cows graze on grass for the major part of the year, farmers may still feed the cows with grain or soy when the grazing season is at its worst. This is also the usual approach within the dairy farming industry.
However, many consumers considered that the way the words were used on the packaging misled them. Kerrygold butter is typically sold at a price point that is higher than other brands, which was the basis for some buyers thinking they had paid more due to their assumption.
That led to the filing of a lawsuit.
The 2018 Grass-Fed Lawsuit
Now let’s take a look at what went down in 2018, and specifically, the Grass-Fed Lawsuit.
You must know about this one that the main complaint was regarding the claim of the company that their cows were grass-fed, and exclusively too. But the lawsuit claims that this wasn’t even the case, not all the time, at least.
And the people involved in this case say that they went on to buy this so-called grass-fed cow butter for years on end until 2018, and now they kinda feel cheated on.
Sure, when it all ended up in court, the case, aka lawsuit, was quickly dismissed, but yeah, it still set off a wider debate about the way food manufacturers portray their items.
The PFAS Packaging Lawsuit
Several years later, Kerrygold found itself in a legal battle once again; however, this time the topic of dispute was radically different. Whereas the original lawsuit focused on the feeding of the cows, this time the complaint was about the packaging of the butter.
On Valentine’s Day, 2023, a consumer named Carolyn Winans initiated a class action complaint against Ornua Foods North America at a federal court in New York.
The class action is about per and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are sometimes utilized in food packaging to prevent grease from leaking through. These chemicals are known as “forever chemicals” as they hardly ever degrade in nature.
It was argued in the statement that the label “pure Irish butter” could be deceptive if the packaging indeed contained these manmade chemicals.
