No longer content simply to ask where the beef is, a growing number of consumer are going to court to find out and filing lawsuits claiming that restaurants are being deceptive in how they market their menu items.
Burger King is the latest company in the crosshairs. In August, a federal judge in Florida refused to dismiss a class-action suit that claims Burger King's ads overstate the amount of meat in its Whopper burger and other sandwiches.
But Burger King is far from the only one. Perkins Coie, a law firm that tracks class action suits, said 214 were filed against food and beverage companies in 2022 and 101 were filed in the first six months of this year. That's a huge increase from 2010, when just 45 were filed.
Pooja Nair, who represents food and beverage companies as a partner with the Beverly Hills, California-based law firm Ervin Cohen and Jessup, said waves of class action lawsuits started hitting federal courts a few years ago.
Some of the first were false advertising claims against snack chip makers for not completely filling the bags; most of those were dismissed, she said. Since 2019, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed asserting that consumers are being misled by "vanilla-flavored" products that don't contain pure vanilla or vanilla beans.
More recently, a suit by a Chicago resident against Buffalo Wild Wings that the fast-food chain's boneless chicken wings don't consist of a deboned wing and amounts to false advertising. Another case alleges that Taco...
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