Fairlife brand name plausibly misleading where cows allegedly lived abuse-filled lives of suffering

Bhotiwihok v. Fairlife, LLC, № 2:25-cv-01650-ODW (AGRx), 2026 WL 413749 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 13, 2026)

“In 2014, Select Milk, a dairy cooperative, partnered with Coca-Cola to launch Fairlife, a company with an eponymous line of premium milk and milk products…. Fairlife promotes, and charges more for, high levels of environmental sustainability and animal care.”

Fairlife bottles include the phrase “Recycle Me” on their labels and are stamped with a recyclability arrow, and it claims that its farms are “top in the industry for environmental sustainability.” Plaintiffs alleged that 0% of Fairlife bottles are recyclable and that the sustainability practices at Fairlife’s farms cause disproportionate environmental damage.

Fairlife also allegedly claims to follow industry-leading animal care standards and to have zero tolerance for abusive practices at farms supplying its milk, as represented by its logo:

Fairlife logo

But successive independent investigations have allegedly uncovered “horrendous animal abuse” at farms supplying Fairlife’s milk, which I will not recite but are indeed horrendous.

Plaintiffs alleged the usual California claims.   

Although the court found that plaintiffs hadn’t plausibly alleged enough Coca-Cola involvement to keep the parent company in, claims against Fairlife survived. The only allegations with sufficient particularity involved the Fairlife Logo and the recyclability claims on Fairlife’s bottle label. Nor did plaintiffs successfully plead fraudulent omission. Courts have required plaintiffs to “describe the content of the omission and where the omitted information should or could have been revealed, as well as provide representative samples of advertisements, offers, or other representations that plaintiff relied on to make her purchase and that failed to include the allegedly omitted information.” Although plaintiffs pled that Fairlife “intentionally fail[ed] to disclose material information about the products,” including that Fairlife’s products are derived from abused cows and that the products’ packaging is not recyclable, they didn’t identify where this information should or could have been revealed or which specific “advertisements, offers, or other representations” omitted critical information. Leave to amend granted if there was more.

Claims based on the logo survived as a plausible misrepresentation of Fairlife’s animal care practices. “[B]rand names can be an especially powerful source of misleading information,” even if the brand name itself is not a recognized word. Combining the words “fair” and “life” together in a brand name “may reasonably lead to the assumption that the subject of the brand lives a ‘fair life.’” Superimposed on a cartoon picture of a cow, “the implication becomes unmistakable: the cows are living a fair life. Thus, it is well within reason for a consumer to believe that, based on the Fairlife logo, the cows supplying Fairlife’s dairy products are living lives free from abuse.”

Fairlife argues that its logo was nonactionable puffery. But the Fairlife brand name, “at bottom, suggests that the cows are living lives free from abuse.” That was specific enough for a reasonable consumer to rely on, especially in context of the cow image. “Taking as true at this pleading stage the substantial evidence that shows Fairlife sources its dairy from cows that live dreadful and appalling lives, it is plausible that Fairlife’s labeling is misleading.” This may be an example of the line of cases that refuses to find puffery when no reasonable person could agree that an otherwise capacious term applied.

Recyclability claims on the bottle: Fairlife argued that California provided a safe harbor provision through October 4, 2026. The FAL’s specific regulation of recyclability claims specifically does not apply to “[a]ny product or packaging that is manufactured up to 18 months after the date the department publishes the first material characterization study required” by the law (or before January 1, 2024 if that was later). “Read plainly, it appears that the California Legislature intended to give companies eighteen months after publication of a generally applicable material characterization study to comply with recycling guidelines.” This occurred on April 4, 2024. This safe harbor provision foreclosed the recyclability claims until later in the year. When “specific legislation provides a ‘safe harbor,’ plaintiffs may not use the general unfair competition law to assault that harbor.” Nor may they use express warranty claims.