Post Wants ‘Added Sugar’ Cereal Class Action Tossed

UPDATE 3: November 2020, the Post Foods cereal class action lawsuit website is live. Find out your legal rights as a Class Member.

UPDATE 2: On March 9, 2020, a federal judge certified a class action lawsuit filed against Post Foods by customers who claim the company’s cereal sugar content misleads consumers.

UPDATE: On Oct. 21, 2019, Kellogg’s agreed to pay $20 million to resolve claims that they falsely advertised their sugar-filled cereals as healthy.

Post is attempting to have a class action lawsuit that claims its cereals contain too much sugar to be considered “healthy” dismissed.

The Post cereal class action alleges that Post focuses on positive ingredients and associations with health, like whole grain and vitamin content, without disclosing that added sugar could have negative health impacts.

Several varieties of cereals are named in this Post class action, including: Raisin Bran, Bran Flakes, Post Selects/Great Grains cereals, Honey Bunches of Oats, Post Good Mornings, Post Shredded Wheat, along with others.

The plaintiffs claimed that presenting the positive traits out of context is misleading to customers.

Post has fired back at this assertion, saying that it has the freedom to tout the health benefits of its products under the First Amendment.

Post claims that for customers to attack these health benefit claims is an attempt to “use government coercion to bar truthful speech not the ingredients and nutritional content of the cereal out of the misplaced concern that people cannot be trusted to act wisely on that information.”

In their move to have the false advertising class action lawsuit dismissed, Post also took shots at the expert testimony presented by the customers.

The company said the experts did not help support the customers’ actual argument itself. Post claimed that one study conducted by the customers yielded untrustworthy results based on what was measured — the “effects of removing the truthful statements” from the label entirely as opposed to “their alleged misleading implication.”

Additionally, Post challenged the customers’ citation of a doctor who believed sugar was toxic, saying his opinion differed from that of the larger medical community. Post argued that even if the customers’ theory that sugar is toxic “may one day be validated through scientific research and experiment; the law today cannot apply that conjecture.”

The Post cereals class action lawsuit was filed by Debbie Krommenhock and Stephen Hadley in 2016. They seek to represent all consumers who purchased Post cereals since August 2012.

They claim that Post’s advertisement of only the positive elements of its products without notifying customers of the added sugar in the products violates California’s False Advertising Law, the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, and the Unfair Competition Law.

This move to dismiss the added sugar class action lawsuit by Post is not the company’s first. The company first made a move to dismiss in 2017. U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick did dismiss some of the consumers’ claims at that time, but not all. He found that the claims were preempted by federal law as well as by guidelines for labeling set forth by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

More claims were thrown out in a second move to dismiss an amended version of the Post cereals class action lawsuit.

Krommenhock and Hadley are represented by Jack Fitzgerald, Melanie Rae Persinger and Trevor Matthew Flynn of the Law Office of Jack Fitzgerald PC.

The Post Cereal Added Sugar Class Action Lawsuit is Krommenhock, et al. v. Post Foods LLC, Case No. 3:16-cv-04958, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

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