The Oregon Supreme Court has reversed a lower court ruling, saying the state’s Court of Appeals should reconsider disqualifying a class-action case that accuses the Tillamook County Creamery Association of “greenwashing” practices.
The highest court ruled that customers who say they suffered a financial loss by buying Tillamook products would not need to prove they were convinced by the company’s alleged misleading ads to buy the products.
The decision, issued Thursday – a year after the case was argued at the Lewis & Clark Law School – is a small victory for the plaintiffs. But it does not settle whether a class action will be certified nor does it address any of the ‘greenwashing’ claims in the case.
A class action case allows a group of people to file a suit on behalf of others who have suffered similar losses. If the lawsuit is successful, they can all file for damages.
In the Tillamook case, filed in 2019 in Multnomah County, four Oregon consumers alleged they had purchased Tillamook products because they formed a positive belief based on the 110-year-old farmer-owned dairy cooperative’s advertising that the milk the company used to make its cheese and ice cream came from small family dairies whose cows graze on the Oregon coast’s pastures – when in fact most of Tillamook’s milk comes from an industrial dairy in eastern Oregon.
The lawsuit also alleged that Tillamook’s misrepresentations allowed the company to charge a “premium” price for its products – a premium paid by anyone who bought the products, regardless of whether they saw the company’s marketing and advertising.
A Multnomah County Circuit Court judge dismissed the case, saying it doesn’t qualify for a class-action status because everyone who joined the class-action suit would have had to view the ads and rely on their representations when buying Tillamook products to be financially hurt by the premiums. The Oregon Court of Appeals in August 2022 affirmed that decision.
But the state’s highest court ruled that not everyone who joined the class-action suit would have had to view the ads and rely on their representations to buy Tillamook products in order to be hurt financially by the premium price.
The Tillamook County Creamery Association said in a statement that “the ruling is not a final decision on the merits and does not confirm that this case justifies a trial, it is simply the latest development in a lengthy judicial process.”
The cooperative said it “adamantly disagrees” with the allegations made in the lawsuit and that it has never hidden the fact that not all of its milk and products originate from Tillamook County.
Owned by 60 farmers and employs 900 people in Oregon alone, the cooperative runs two processing plants, one in Tillamook and one in Boardman, and operates the iconic Tillamook Creamery visitor center on the coast.
In 2022, the cooperative exceeded $1.2 billion in retail sales. Its products are found in most supermarkets across the U.S.
Two thirds of its milk comes from Columbia River Dairy outside Boardman, which is owned by Boardman-based Threemile Canyon Farms, Oregon’s largest industrial dairy operation and one of the largest in the U.S. Columbia River Dairy is a confined animal feeding operation and has a permit to hold 28,000 cows.
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