Hershey’s

 

Hershey wins lawsuit claiming its Reese’s Halloween candies aren’t spooky enough

Hershey received a treat when a judge dismissed a lawsuit claiming the company’s Reese’s candies tricked customers by depicting spooky Halloween designs on their packaging, while the unwrapped chocolates were in fact featureless. 

U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian ruled that the consumers who filed the class-action lawsuit failed to show that the lack of confectionary details on the chocolate and peanut butter candies, such as missing mouths and eyes on jack-‘o-lanterns, ghosts and other Halloween-themed figures, had cause them economic harm.

Damian pointed out that while the consumers may have been disappointed by the chocolates’ unwrapped appearances, the candies were not “so flawed as to render them worthless.” In other words, the chocolate still tasted like chocolate, even if they weren’t as haunting as the purchasers had expected from the packaging. 

The lawsuit focused on several Hershey candies that are marketed around Halloween, including its Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins and its Reese’s White Ghost, as well as a few other holiday-themed chocolates. 

The original lawsuit, filed in 2024, claimed that Hershey used deceptive advertising because the “artistic designs” depicted on the wrappers were absent from the actual candies.

But the difference between the wrappers and the chocolates’ actual appearances wasn’t enough to prove “a concrete economic injury,” Damian wrote on Friday.

He added, “We believe that companies should not be rewarded with sales when they falsely represent the main characteristic of the product and only have to pay damages if it can be shown that the consumers paid a premium.”