Folgers Coffee

This MDL consolidates consumer class actions alleging that the manufacturer of Folgers ground coffee and a major retail partner misrepresented the number of servings certain coffee canisters could produce, advertising an "up to" serving count that plaintiffs allege the products could not consistently deliver. Centralized in the Western District of Missouri in 2021, the docket has narrowed from 13 total actions filed to 5 pending, with plaintiffs successfully defeating an early motion to dismiss and asserting claims for misrepresentation, breach of warranty, unjust enrichment, and violations of state consumer-protection statutes across overlapping nationwide and statewide purchaser classes.

What drives resolution in a slack-fill or serving-count labeling docket like this one is a comparatively narrow, well-worn body of consumer-protection law: whether the specific label language was likely to deceive a reasonable consumer, and whether a purchaser class can be certified given state-by-state variation in consumer-protection statutes. Because roughly 60 percent of the originally filed actions have already resolved or been dismissed, the docket has moved well past its early motion-practice phase and is now concentrated on the claims and theories that survived that stage.

For anyone tracking how consumer slack-fill and labeling MDLs progress relative to larger mass-tort dockets, Folgers is a useful smaller-scale example: a modest but genuine consumer-protection claim that has worked through motion practice and substantially narrowed its action count within about five years, without the kind of settlement-fund infrastructure that characterizes much larger consumer or personal-injury dockets. Criterica Intelligence's platform tracks this kind of smaller, steadily narrowing consumer-labeling docket alongside larger matters, since claim volume alone does not determine whether a docket represents a meaningful or resolved dispute.