POM Wonderful Case Study

The case that I will be talking about today is the case of POM Wonderful LLC vs Coca-Cola Company in which POM Wonderful felt that Coca-Cola was using false advertising to promote its own drink to sell to customers. POM Wonderful makes its own fruits to be used in their fruit chooses and they sell a drink that is made of 100 percent fruit juices with 85 percent being pomegranate juice and the other 15 percent blueberry juice. Coca-Cola also make a juice drink through the Minute Maid division of their company with the label saying pomegranate blueberry in giant letters. The Coca-Cola juice is made with only 0.3 percent of pomegranate juice and 0.2 percent of blueberry juice along with 0.1 percent of raspberry juice and 99.4 percent of a combination of apple and grape juices. The focus of the complaint was that the Coca-Cola juice label had the words pomegranate and blueberry in all capital letters and then underneath that the words got smaller and explained that it was a “flavored blend of 5 juices” and that it was made “from concentrate with added ingredients” (Cheeseman). POM stated that Coca-Cola was in violation of the Lanham Act which is a federal law prohibiting false advertising and unfair competition laws. Pom challenged that the name, labeling, marketing, and advertising of Coca Cola’s pomegranate blueberry juice drink (Oyez.org).

The district court ruled that POM Wonderful’s claim could not be heard because of the FDCA or the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act