A Florida woman has decided to take action, suing the chocolate company Hershey over the lack of designs on Reese’s holiday-themed peanut butter candy.
Cynthia Kelly filed a federal class-action lawsuit on Thursday in the U.S. District Court in the Middle District of Florida after she claimed the company’s products didn’t match the photos depicted on the wrappers.
Kelly says that she bought Reese’s peanut butter pumpkins, which are marketed on the wrapper to have Jack O’lantern-style carvings, but had no carvings and are only egg-shaped.
But Kelly says that this isn’t the only candy to be marketed this way, as she also says the peanut butter footballs, bats, and white chocolate ghosts all lack the carvings depicted on their wrappers.
The lawsuit says the company has a history of deceiving customers with the promise of “explicit carved out artistic designs.”
The complaint alleges that the company’s products “are materially misleading and numerous consumers have been tricked and misled by the pictures on the products’ packaging.”
The lawsuit says that Kelly purchased her bag of peanut butter pumpkins for $4.49 at an Aldi in Hillsborough County, Florida, in late October 2023.
The lawsuit also says that Kelly “believed that the product contained a cute-looking carving of a pumpkin’s mouth and eyes as pictured on the product packaging.”
“Plaintiff and the members of the Class have been aggrieved by Defendant’s unfair and deceptive practices,” the suit reads. “They purchased the Products with the reasonable expectation that the Products would look similar to the pictures displayed on the Products’ packaging.”
Kelly is seeking at least $5 million from the company in the lawsuit.