A federal judge in New York has given the go-ahead to a New York woman’s class action lawsuit which claims consumers are being duped by Cold Stone Creamery when they purchase certain flavors that “do not contain their represented ingredients.”
Is it nuts to assume a scoop of pistachio ice cream should contain actual pistachios? Or how about real butter in a dish of butter pecan?
Such weighty questions about a favorite summertime confection could soon be decided by the courts.
A federal judge in New York has given the go-ahead to a Long Island woman’s class action lawsuit that claims consumers are being duped by Cold Stone Creamery when they purchase certain flavors that “do not contain their represented ingredients.”
Lead plaintiff Jenna Marie Duncan purchased her serving of pistachio ice cream from a Cold Stone Creamery store in Levittown, New York, in or around July 2022. According her lawsuit, Duncan “reasonably believed that the Pistachio ice cream she purchased from defendant contained pistachio.”
That's still a win though, because nobody will be duped into paying a premium for artificial flavoring.
A related label that pisses me off is "zero sugar" when artificial sweeteners are used. I like sparkling water, in large part because it has absolutely no sweetener of any kind in it, but sometimes in a hurry I grab one of these pieces of shit and it really pisses me off.
It's also cold stone, so you can get a mix-in of pistachios and actually have real pistachios in your pistachio flavored ice cream.
Also: Now I wonder if the cheese cake ice cream has cheese cake in it. I usually assume everything is artificially flavored unless it's plain chocolate or vanilla.
Vanilla is a pretty expensive spice and vanillin can be synthesized from oil or wood, you should probably assume most things vanilla flavored are artificially flavored. There is way more demand for vanilla than the amount of vanilla pods grown in the world.
Cold Stone mixes the ice cream in front of you. Like, that's the schtick. To make that easier, their ice cream doesn't have any nuts or candies or anything already mixed in.
So they can't add actual pistachios to their pistachio ice cream. They could use natural pistachio flavor, but I understand why they don't.
Anything that is artificially flavored should be properly labelled, so I think this is a valid lawsuit. But I would have expected that Cold Stone uses artificial flavors in most of their ice cream.
Like the "Butter Chicken" sauce in a jar that I saw in the supermarket. Basically: "Fry chicken, pour contents of jar over it, cook ten minutes, ready!" like. With 7.5g of butter in total for four servings of butter chicken.
My Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani) uses 100g butter for the sauce, and some Ghee for frying purposes.
Although I have seen recipes on he net which are completely devoid of butter. Why do they still call this "Butter Chicken" then?