I’ve always thought smoked almonds are a good thing, but I was dead wrong. Tasty, healthy, cheap, available everywhere. All these years, I thought I was eating smoked almonds, but I wasn’t. I was being cheated, duped, scammed and RIPPED OFF. But that’s all about to come to an end. Because Johnnie Bynum and his lawyer, Spencer Sheehan, have taken up the sword to protect me from smoked almonds – – and I just don’t know what to say.
You see, Johnnie lives in Bronx, New York, and he likes smoked almonds too. One day, he shelled out $1.00 for a bag of Family Dollar Stores’ smoked almonds and as he was popping them into his mouth, he wondered, “How do they smoke these things?” He turned the bag over and saw it said “NATURAL SMOKE FLAVOR.” Johnnie (being a smart New Yorker) put 2 and 2 together: The smoke flavor in these almonds isn’t really smoke flavor at all, it’s smoke flavorING. GOOD GRIEF: Instead of holding the nuts over a smokey fire, a smokey flavor is added to them. And with this, Johnnie’s world came to a halt.
I’ve been to the Bronx, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that people from the Bronx won’t be pushed around. Johnnie could have gone back to his Bronx Dollar General Store and demanded his money back. But they’re from the Bronx too, and would have told him to “go pound sand.” Or he could have written a letter to Family Dollar’s President, who’s not from the Bronx (he’s in Tennessee), and pushed him around. But Jonnie had bigger plans. He scurried over to attorney Spencer Sheehan’s office and they filed a class action claiming that Johnnie had been cheated. Their lawsuit claims that, “Family Dollar Stores … sells almonds purporting to obtain their flavor through actually being smoked.” They admit that the back of the package says “NATURAL SMOKE FLAVOR” – – but they aren’t letting that detail deter them. They claim, “Had (Johnnie) known the truth, (he) would not have bought the Product or would have paid less for it.” Right. I can hear Johnnie now talking to a Bronx store operator. “Yoe. Deeze here $1.00 almonds don’t got no smoke. It’s smoke flavor. I’ll give ‘yaz 85 cents for ‘dem.” That wouldn’t have lasted a New York minute.
Here’s another quote from Spencer and Johnnie’s lawsuit: The label’s “… red color scheme, evocative of fire used in actual smoking, such that smoke is reasonably understood by consumers to be its characterizing flavor.” I’ve seen plenty of smokey fires. They aren’t red. They’re smokey. But that’s not going to deter Spencer and Johnnie. They’re on a mission from God.
All this smokey justice got me to thinking. There are other foods that have been ripping us all off for years. Orange soda doesn’t contain oranges. Wild cherry coke doesn’t contain wild cherries, or even tame cherries. But it doesn’t stop there: Eskimo Pies don’t come from Alaska. Philadelphia Cream Cheese is made in Lowville, New York. I had a Denver Omelet in Torrance once. And what about Mars Candies? I think Spencer and Johnnie have their work cut out for them.
The Food Lawyers® take: Twenty-five years of defending class actions have taught me that some class actions involve important matters and some are just nonsense game playing. The class action against Volkswagen for falsifying emissions data was definitely a good thing. Class actions regarding faulty artificial heart valves and defective hip replacements benefit groups of people who could never challenge BIG MEDICINE on their own. That’s where class actions get us all real justice.
And then, there are guys like Spencer and Johnnie who tie up the courts and hassle honest businesses to protect me from smoked almonds. And the legal system lets them get away with it. Sometimes, I wonder if they’re all just nuts.
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