Just after Thanksgiving last week, the Eighth Circuit issued an opinion reversing a district court’s certification of a class in one of several actions brought by a consumer against Folgers and consolidated by the JPML. In the action on appeal, the consumer had alleged that representations on coffee containers featured misrepresentations about the number of cups each container could produce, and brought claims for violation of the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act and for unjust enrichment.
The Eighth Circuit held that the district court had erred in finding the predominance requirement satisfied, because “for many people in [the] proposed class, the representations on the containers would not have caused them any ascertainable loss” since ” a significant proportion of the proposed class did not read those representations or, if they did, did not care about them one way or the other.” Because “many class members weren’t deceived, and figuring out who was and who wasn’t will require consumer-by-consumer inquiries into each class member’s individual tastes, interpretations,” class treatment was not appropriate.
The court further rejected that all purchasers were harmed, because the misrepresentations drove up demand and thus the price for everyone–finding that such a price-premium argument would not satisfy the ascertainable-loss requirement of the Missouri law.
Finally, the court endorsed the general rule that unjust-enrichment claims are inappropriate for class treatment and found no reason to depart from that general rule here
