A class-action lawsuit against Coca-Cola has stumbled again in federal district court after a judge found a lack of evidence for claims that the beverage giant’s juices were misbranded as “all natural,” despite containing dangerous levels of “forever chemicals.”
The opinion, issued Monday out of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, comes more than a year after Judge Nelson Román dismissed an initial complaint brought by plaintiff Joseph Lurenz of New York due to a lack of evidence.
Lurenz returned to the court a month later with an amended complaint that said there is “widespread and uniform contamination” of PFAS in the company’s Simply Tropical product lines — including levels of PFOA 100 times higher than EPA’s drinking water standards.
“Absent specific facts concerning the various tests, the Court cannot conclude that the presence of PFAS in the tested Products was anything more than a ‘sheer possibility,'” Román wrote in his Monday opinion.
