backOn March 19, 2025, King & Spalding secured a victory for client Beech-Nut Nutrition Company for the second time with prejudice after the Second Circuit vacated a prior dismissal order and remanded the matter in consolidated proceedings of 20 lawsuits alleging false advertising related to purported heavy metals in baby food. District Judge David N. Hurd of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York ruled that the plaintiffs in the putative class action did not allege an injury in fact sufficient to confer Article III standing. The court found that the plaintiffs’ benefit-of-the-bargain theory of economic injury failed because while plaintiffs claimed that they paid for baby food that is safe and healthy for children to consume, “they do not allege that defendant’s products were worth something less than this or unusable.” Moreover, the court also found that the plaintiffs’ price premium theory of economic injury failed; the plaintiffs did not allege that the products were marketed “such that a misrepresentation existed with respect to the existence of heavy metals,” and while plaintiffs “express[ed] regret about what they paid for a product given an unfavorable report,” “they do not state what they would have done differently had they known to plausibly give rise to the notion they paid a premium.”
The King & Spalding team included Livia Kiser, Keri Borders, Michael Resch, and Rebecca Johns. The team had earlier defeated a proposed MDL that would have encompassed all baby food companies named in similar proposed class action lawsuits, causing plaintiffs to sever and transfer their claims against Beech-Nut to the Northern District of New York. The first consolidated complaint was dismissed on primary jurisdiction grounds, but the Second Circuit vacated that decision and remanded the matter for further proceedings. The consolidated complaint was dismissed again in its entirety with prejudice after a second round of briefing.