Hershey received a treat on Friday when a judge rejected a legal action claiming that the company’s reese candies deceived customers by depicting the frightening Halloween conceptions on their packaging, while the non -packaged chocolates were in fact without feature.
US District Judge Melissa Damian ruled on Friday that consumers who filed the collective appeal did not show that the lack of confectionery details on chocolate and peanut butter, such as Mountains and missing eyes on Jack-‘o-Lantern, Ghosts and other figures on the theme of Halloween, caused them economic prejudices.
Damian pointed out that even if consumers may have been disappointed with the non-packaged appearances of chocolates, candies were not “so imperfect as to make them worthless”. In other words, chocolate always had a chocolate taste, even if they were not as obsessive as buyers expected packaging.
American Court of Southern Florida South
The trial focused on several Hershey candies that are marketed around Halloween, including Reese peanut butter pumpkins and its white Reese ghost, as well as some other chocolates on the theme of holidays such as Reese peanut bells.
The original trial, tabled in 2024, said that Hershey had used a misleading advertising because the “artistic conceptions” represented on packaging were absent from candies.
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But the difference between packaging and the real appearances of chocolates was not sufficient to prove “a concrete economic injury,” wrote Damian on Friday.
“The conclusive allegations of the complainants explain why they would have been deprived of the benefit of their negotiations are summed up in their subjective and personal expectations of the way in which the products would have or should have traveled when they were unpacked,” added the judge.
Anthony Russo, consumer lawyer who continued Hershey, said they intended to change the complaint.
“The court simply affirms that the complainants did not expressly allegedly allegedly in the complaint that the products were worthless to them or that they paid a price premium and allowed the applicants to modify the complaint, which they will do,” Russo told CBS News.
He added: “We believe that companies should not be rewarded with sales when they falsely represent the main characteristic of the product and should only pay damages if consumers have paid a bonus.”
Hershey did not immediately respond to a request for comments.