William Cole Featured In Law.Com/New Jersey Law Journal Article on Wave of Seltzer Water Litigation
In an article on the growing number of cases being filed against fruit flavored seltzer waters, William Cole, one of the founders of Amin Talati’s new litigation-focused Los Angeles office, offered his expertise on how these cases fit into the larger picture of food flavor related litigation that he is seeing in his practice.
From the article:
“The growth in seltzer litigation appears to be an outgrowth of a recent explosion of suits over product labels that claim to be vanilla-flavored, said William Cole of Amin Talati Wasserman in Los Angeles, who represents defendants in food labeling suits.
Over the past 18 months, suits have been filed against makers of everything from Coca-Cola to cake mix and almond milk, claiming that consumers are misled by labels using the term vanilla even though no vanilla beans are used in their production. But many of the vanilla suits have been thrown out at the motion-to-dismiss stage, Cole said.
The theories behind the seltzer and vanilla cases are similar, he said.
“The fruit-flavoring litigation is like version 2.0 of the vanilla flavoring cases. There’s been a long history over the past 18 months of cases alleging that products that say vanilla on the package are mislabeled because it’s not real vanilla, or that’s the allegation,” Cole said. “Those have been hitting courts without much success. Now this same type of theory is now being brought to fruit-flavored beverages. The fruit-flavored beverage industry is just an exploding area. It’s a big market right now.”
The full article is available at: https://www.law.com/njlawjournal/2021/09/29/vanilla-2-0-litigation-battleground-emerging-over-fruit-flavored-seltzer/ [Subscription Required]
