If you bought a Reese’s “pumpkin” this past Halloween expecting a grinning jack-o’-lantern and instead received what can only be described as a smooth, peanut-butter-filled “chocolate blob,” congratulations — you may be the protagonist in the next great American courtroom confectionary drama!
A group of consumers originally sued Hershey in May 2024 in Fort Lauderdale federal court, alleging they paid a premium for Reese’s peanut butter pumpkins because the wrapper shows a pumpkin-shaped chocolate with triangle eyes and a grin carved through to the filling.
Instead, the plaintiffs say, customers unwrapped a face-free mound and, apparently, a lifetime of disappointment.
The original suit sought at least $5 million in damages and was filed by Anthony Russo of the Russo Firm in Boca Raton, Florida.
U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian initially tossed the suit out, concluding that the plaintiffs’ complaints “all boil down to their subjective, personal expectations" — a legal way of saying: fancy packaging doesn't equal guaranteed facial features.
But Judge Damian left the plaintiffs a sling and some duct tape: she allowed them to amend their complaint because the original filing lacked details on what the plaintiffs might have paid for the candy had the wrapper been less imaginative.
Enter the amended complaint, stage left, brandishing spreadsheets like a medieval mace.
The plaintiffs now say they have pricing data showing the pumpkin-shaped Reese’s cost about 20% more per ounce at Target and Walmart — and a chewy 25% more on Hershey’s own website.
“That same-brand differential is concrete, measurable, and material,” the plaintiffs argue, which is lawyer jargon for “we have numbers, judge — and they’re not pretty.”
Hershey’s response was succinct and scar-less: lawyers for the chocolate colossus called the amended complaint a “futile effort to resurrect this meritless case.”
Hershey’s legal team (from Shook, Hardy & Bacon) previously argued that “no reasonable consumer would be deceived into thinking that the individual candies were carved with faces.”
They point to what they say is a helpful caveat on the packaging — the words “decorating suggestion” printed right next to the jack-o’-lantern image — and a picture of the candy without carvings and with a bite taken out of it.
As partner Daniel Rogers wrote, that partially eaten image should tip off anyone “exercising basic common sense that the candy will not appear exactly as imagined on the package.”
Rogers added, wryly, that nobody expects to buy food “with a huge chunk bitten out.”
This case sits in a growing legal trend: so-called price premium claims.
Consumers increasingly sue over allegedly misleading labels, arguing they wouldn’t have paid as much — or wouldn’t have bought the product at all — had the packaging been more honest.
Success hinges on the ability to link deception to measurable economic harm; fail to make that connection, and the suit often collapses like a sad chocolate mold!
The Reese’s plaintiffs seem to have learned that lesson from earlier lost causes.
Remember the 2022 Publix cough-drops case about “honey-lemon” imagery?
That one was dismissed after a judge found plaintiffs failed to show similar lozenges without lemon imagery actually sold for less.
Packaging outrage without a price differential is courtroom confetti — fun, but legally irrelevant...
Whether the Reese’s pumpkin case rises again depends on whether the court accepts the amended complaint and whether the plaintiffs’ price comparisons hold up under cross-examination — and in aisle comparisons at Target, Walmart, and Hershey.com.
If the judge lets the suit proceed, the nation may get to watch a class-action spectacle where economic injury is measured not by emotional disappointment but by a per-ounce calculus of pumpkin-shaped sorrow.
In the meantime, candy lovers can take practical solace: you can probably still buy actual jack-o’-lanterns — carved by hand, sold at pumpkin patches, fully consenting to facial features — and they might even be cheaper per ounce!
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