Canadian-origin "Truffettes de France" are plausibly misleading

James v. Chocmod USA Inc., 2025 WL 950509, No. 1:22-cv-01435 JLT SKO (E.D. Cal. Mar. 28, 2025)

Plaintiffs sued over defendant’s “Truffettes de France” (trans. “Truffles from France”), which are, despite the name, made in Canada. They brought the usual California claims.

Even if the truffles were not physically different, and if—as defendant argued—it uses the same recipe in France as it does in Canada and doesn’t charge more based on place of manufacture, California law holds that there is a cognizable injury. As the California Supreme Court held in Kwikset:

To some consumers, processes and places of origin matter. … Whether a wine is from a particular locale may matter to the oenophile who values subtle regional differences.

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For each consumer who relies on the truth and accuracy of a label and is deceived by misrepresentations into making a purchase, the economic harm is the same: the consumer has purchased a product that he or she paid more for than he or she otherwise might have been willing to pay if the product had been labeled accurately. This economic harm—the loss of real dollars from a consumer’s pocket—is the same whether or not a court might objectively view the products as functionally equivalent. … Two wines might to almost any palate taste indistinguishable—but to serious oenophiles, the difference between one year and the next, between grapes from one valley and another nearby, might be sufficient to carry with it real economic differences in how much they would pay.

Chocmod tried to defend by arguing that it had trademark rights in its brand name and thus no reasonable consumer would be deceived, particularly because the back label “explicitly states” that they were made in Canada. Initially, Moore v. Mars Petcare US, Inc., 966 F.3d 1007 (9th Cir. 2020), held:

[B]rand names by themselves can be misleading in the context of the product being marketed. Descriptive brand names require of the consumer “little thought,” which can make consumers susceptible to purchasing because “they won’t have the time or interest to read about [the product] on [the] website or the back of the box.” Thus, a product called “One a Day” gummy vitamins, which required two gummies a day for a full dosage, is explicitly misleading.

The court rejected Chocmod’s argument that “any reasonable consumer should ... be expected to review the packaging to determine the country of origin, if that is something the consumer feels is important.” The front-label representations were plausibly misleading to reasonable consumers, who aren’t required to look beyond the front of the box. Only if reasonable consumers couldn’t think they’d answered their questions with the front of the package—only if they’d “necessarily require more information before reasonably concluding that the label is making a particular representation”—do courts consider the back as potentially resolving an inherent ambiguity.  (Emphasis mine.)

The brand name “Truffettes de France,” or “Truffles from France,” was not ambiguous and would plausibly mislead a reasonable consumer. This was much clearer than ambiguous images or phrases addressed in other cases. Cf. Culver v. Unilever United States, Inc., 2021 WL 2943937 (C.D. Cal. June 14, 2021) (front labels “Paris,” Depuis 1747,” and “Que Maille”; court explicitly distinguished “de Paris”); Eshelby v. L’Oreal USA, Inc., 664 F. Supp. 3d 417 (S.D.N.Y. 2023) (“L’Oreal Paris” on front label could lead reasonable consumers to think that the company originated in Paris, but not that any particular product was); La Barbera v. Ole Mexican Foods Inc., 2023 WL 4162348 (C.D. Cal. May 18, 2023) (“Phrases like ‘The Taste of Mexico!’ are at once true in every meaningful sense and meaningless; the point is that they are different in kind from stating the Products are from Mexico.”).

Here, there was an actual representation about the truffles’ county of origin, which was “so misleading” that a reasonable consumer “need not search elsewhere for the truth.” Chocmod argued that the product name was no different from French onion soup, French fries, Belgian chocolates, Mexican burritos, or Chinese chicken salad. The court was open to the idea that “French truffles” would be insufficient to satisfy the reasonable consumer test. But “from France” was different. The label didn’t make representations about style or recipe, which would be different. Moreover, “the reasonableness of a consumer’s belief that a salad or other perishable item was shipped from another country is incomparable to his relative belief as to a shelf-stable product like chocolate, which was, in fact, shipped from another country—Canada.”