Campbell Soup Sued Over Heart Association Endorsements; The association labels more than 30 of Campbell’s Healthy Request soups as “heart-healthy” even though a can has at least six times as much sodium as the organization recommends

August 16, 2013 Leave a comment

Campbell Soup Sued Over Heart Association Endorsements

Campbell Soup Co. (CPB) and the American Heart Association were sued by a consumer who claimed the AHA fraudulently certifies the company’s products as healthy.

The association labels more than 30 of Campbell’s Healthy Request soups as “heart-healthy” even though a can has at least six times as much sodium as the organization recommends, according to a complaint filed yesterday by Kerry O’Shea in federal court in Camden, New Jersey. Those soups display the AHA’s “Heart-Check Mark” logo, which the organization licenses, according to the complaint.Campbell, the world’s largest soup maker, and the heart association “falsely represent” that products with the logo have cardiovascular benefits lacking in other soups, according to the complaint. Higher sodium levels contribute to elevated blood pressure, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes.

The logo “fools consumers by misrepresenting that products bearing the Heart-Check Mark certification meet the AHA’s heart-healthy nutritional guidelines,” according to the complaint. “That misrepresentation (or omission of the true facts) is unfair, deceptive, and misleading.”

A spokeswoman for Camden-based Campbell, Carla Burigatto, said in a voice-mail that the company hadn’t been served with the complaint.

In an e-mailed statement, the American Heart Association, a nonprofit organization based in Dallas, said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

‘Laboratory Testing’

“Our Food Certification Program regularly conducts laboratory testing to verify that products earning the Heart Check meet our nutritional criteria, which are more stringent than those of the Food and Drug Administration,” according to the e-mail. Food companies pay an administrative fee, it said.

O’Shea, who lives in Huntington Beach, California, is seeking to sue under the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act on behalf of a class of buyers of Heart Check-labeled Healthy Request soup.

The case is O’Shea v. Campbell Soup Co., 13-cv-04887, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey (Camden).

To contact the reporter on this story: David Voreacos in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net

Filed under Health, Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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