As more and more people are trying to switch away from dairy milk, whether it's for ethical
reasons, going vegan or if it's just because they're lactose intolerance, almond milk has
become hugely popular.
And unfortunately what we're finding out now, according to several different class action
lawsuits, several popular brands of almond milk are falsely advertising what kind of
vanilla, if any, they actually contain.
Joining me now to explain what's happening is Scott Hardy with Top Class Actions.
And Scott, we've got two here, two separate products, two separate class action lawsuits.
Let's start with the first one, the almond breeze class action here saying, yeah, you're,
you're telling me you're using real vanilla but there's no actual real vanilla anywhere
in your almond milk.
Exactly, you've got almond breeze, which is advertising that it's flavored naturally.
But when you take a look at the ingredients, there are synthetic ingredients that are not,
it doesn't include real vanilla.
And of course, if you want a nice creamy almond milk, which thankfully I don't drink, you'd
think that there's actually real vanilla in it.
But no, these are just artificial flavors that are making you think that you are tasting
vanilla and uh, unfortunately almond breeze at least square to this class action decided
to save the money because vanilla can be expensive and instead of flavoring it with real vanilla
are using these ingredients to make you think that there's vanilla in there.
And again, as you and I have talked about before, real actual vanilla is, is not cheap.
It's fairly hard to get a hold of and so that's why imitation or vanilla extract is so popular.
It's cheaper, it's readily available, put it in anything tastes just like the original
for the most part.
And so all almond breeze had to do here was say, hey, real vanilla extract.
I mean really, just real vanilla extract, no problems at all.
But they chose to not do that.
They chose to say real vanilla and they do that because people are going to be drawn
to something and you and I again discuss this all the time.
They're drawn to something that seems all natural, something that is real as opposed
to something that may be imitation.
And just because it's imitation, doesn't mean it's worse, doesn't mean it's bad for you.
But we've kind of had it beaten into our heads that nope, anything that's artificially flavored
is horrible.
We've got to get the, the non artificially flavored.
And I think that that kind of plays into this here too.
Exactly, and then you have Califia Farms who has been accused of the same thing.
They've got their almond milk, allegedly fake vanilla.
They're fake vanilla comes from tree bark or lignin and, you know, they actually have
a picture of the, the vanilla flour on the bottle itself.
So you look at this say, oh, almond milk, vanilla flour.
I'm getting something all natural.
This is good.
But nope, you're actually not getting real vanilla in this case either, Califia Farms
is according to this class action, just using vanilla flavoring.
And to me that's so much worse because almond breeze, maybe, maybe they've got a little
bit of an argument they could use as a defense, but this one, the Califia, you've got the
picture of the vanilla on the box.
Any reasonable consumers gonna look at that and say, oh okay, I shouldn't think for a
second that this is tree bark flavoring your milk.
To me they seem like they've got a real problem here because that's pretty obvious what they're
trying to do.
They are trying to mislead consumers into thinking that what's on the box is what's
inside the box and that's not always the case.
Exactly.
What you're, what you're drinking, you would think has some vanilla in it, but nope, you
know, they're saving some money using their tree bark, which tastes like vanilla according
to them and serving that up to you rather than spending the extra money to actually
get real vanilla in their almond milk.
For more information about these two class actions, please follow the links in the description
of this video.
Head on over to topclassactions.com and while you're there, make sure you subscribe to their
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Scott Hardy, Top Class Actions.
Thank you very much for talking with
me today.
You're welcome.
Thanks for your time, Farron.