A new class action lawsuit has targeted the makers and sellers of TGI Friday’s Mozzarella Sticks snack food, claiming the snack sticks’ labels mislead consumers because they actually contain cheddar cheese, not mozzarella.
On Feb. 5, attorney Thomas A. Zimmerman Jr. and others with the Zimmerman Law Offices P.C., of Chicago, filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against TGI Friday’s Inc. and Phoenix, Az.-based Inventure Foods.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of named plaintiff Amy Joseph, identified only as a resident of Illinois.
Tom Zimmernam Jr.
| Zimmerman Law Offices
According to the complaint, Joseph in 2020 purchased six bags of TGI Friday’s Mozzarella Sticks online at Amazon. The snack foods were shipped to her home.
The complaint said the images of the product and its packaging posted on Amazon did not include images of the product’s actual ingredients list. However, only upon receiving the product did Joseph learn the “mozzarella sticks” actually contained cheddar cheese, not the mozzarella cheese she said she expected to receive, based on the product’s packaging.
The complaint asserts the inclusion of cheddar cheese in the cheese sticks both defies “the commonsense proposition that a food called ‘mozzarella sticks’ would contain mozzarella cheese” and “runs afoul” of consumer fraud laws in every U.S. state and regulations promulgated by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
The complaint asserts that customers, including Joseph, would not have purchased the product if they had known the sticks contained cheddar, not mozzarella cheese.
“Indeed, mozzarella cheese is the defining ingredient in mozzarella sticks, such that the substitution of another type of cheese in place of mozzarella cheese renders the Mozzarella Sticks an entirely different product from that the Plaintiff and Class members were willing to purchase,” the complaint said.
“Put another way, Plaintiff and Class members wanted to purchase mozzarella sticks, and not ‘cheddar sticks’ or ‘imitation mozzarella sticks.’”
The complaint seeks to expand the action to include a class of plaintiffs from throughout the U.S., to include virtually anyone who purchased TGI Friday’s brand Mozzarella Sticks.
The complaint notes this would include “thousands of (consumers), if not more.” The complain notes that Dun & Bradstreet estimated Inventure has annual sales of more than $269 million and TGI Friday’s has sales of more than $252 million per year.
The complaint asks the court to order the defendants to repay actual damages alleged by the plaintiffs and class members, as well as compensatory damages equivalent to “any of Defendants’ ill-gotten gains,” plus attorney fees.