Tabet DiVito & Rothstein helped secure a dismissal of all claims in a consumer fraud action in the Southern District of Illinois. Vineyard v. La Terra Fina USA, LLC is a putative class action in which the plaintiff alleged that a product distributor’s line of snack dips falsely claimed to contain “no artificial preservatives” when they contained citric acid. Judge Rosenstengel granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss, finding that the plaintiff failed to plausibly allege that the citric acid was artificially produced. The court found her theory—essentially that because 99% of the world’s citric acid is industrially produced, the product distributor probably uses artificial citric acid too—to be impermissible probability-based reasoning that lacked any nexus to the product distributor’s actual practices.
The court dismissed all four counts. The court dismissed the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act claims under Rule 9(b)’s heightened pleading standard because the plaintiff offered only statistical conjecture rather than defendant-specific allegations. The court dismissed the ICFA unfair practices claim for the same reason under Rule 8. The breach of express warranty and unjust enrichment claims fell with the ICFA claims since they rested on the same deficient factual foundation.
Dan Stanner and Amanda Catalano represented the defendant along with attorneys at Covington & Burling in Washington DC.