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A real nut case: Cold Stone Creamery faces suit over lack of real pistachios in pistachio ice cream

apnews.com A real nut case: Cold Stone Creamery faces suit over lack of real pistachios in pistachio ice cream

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.”

38 comments

I'm sure all that will happen is they'll change the label to say "pistachio flavored ice cream" lol
- 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.
  
  Zero sugar is a correct label in that case
  
  Just gotta look for “unsweetened.”
  
  It is wild to me how many flavored waters are sweetened. The unsweetened ones are perfectly fine, why do they need to be so saccharine?
- ** no actual pistachios were used for flavor.
  
  No pistachios were harmed in the making of this ice cream.
- Introducing new PistaSHEO (R) ice cream, only from Cold Stone!
- 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.
  
  I think this has me on the fence.
  
  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.
It’s a decently fair complaint. Other food products have to use language to somewhat clearly differentiate between real and “flavored like” products.
- KFC "Honey Sauce" comes to mind.
  
  That still makes it sound like there’s real honey in it. Should be “Honey Flavored Sauce” IMO
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?
I would never think that butter pecan ice cream would contain butter
- You toast pecans in butter for several minutes to get that specific flavor. Butters a prominent ingredient and a core flavor.
  
  You should think that butter pecan ice cream would contain butter, because it's supposed to.
  
  You should expect it the same way you would expect pecans, because they are both named ingredients of the flavor.
The horror - can you imagine?! No real pistachios, are you fucking kidding me?!?! It’s like the goddamned bread lines in Mother Russia during the 80’s!

/s because I just know…
- I'm confused, are you against consumer rights? I don't think anyone actually cares if it's real or fake. They just want it to be on the packaging so they can make an informed choice
- If you want to advertise your "Pistachio flavored confectionery" you can put whatever you want in it - if you're calling it "Pistachio Ice Cream" I expect actual pistachios to be contributing mainly to the flavoring. I'm honestly sad we allow "X flavored" instead of forcing these shit-heels to explicitly call it out like "Artificially X flavored" but it'll take a lot of consumer advocacy to get us back into the realm of sanity.
- Are you one of those people who thinks if a bad thing is not as bad as another bad thing then it isn't bad at all?
  
  Because I'd personally rather be poked in the eye than stabbed in the chest, but I wouldn't say either thing was good.
  
  Because I'd personally rather be poked in the eye than stabbed in the chest
  
  Instructions unclear, proceeding to stab you in the eye.

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