Group Threatens Frito-Lay With Lawsuit
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A consumer group is demanding that Frito-Lay put warning labels on chips with the fat substitute olestra or face a lawsuit by a Massachusetts woman who says she got stomach cramps and had to use the bathroom quickly after eating the snacks. The Center for Science in the Public Interest said Wednesday that 30-year-old Lori Perlow of Braintree, Mass., would sue Frito-Lay under a consumer-friendly deceptive-advertising law in the Bay State. Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo Inc., said warning labels are not needed for its Light lines of potato and corn chips. “It’s an extremely safe product, well-tested,” said Frito-Lay spokeswoman Aurora Gonzalez. “If the law says we don’t have to have (a label), we don’t see the need for it either.” The Food and Drug Administration approved olestra, made by Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co., in 1996 but required products with the fake fat to carry a label warning that they could cause cramps and diarrhea. The requirement was lifted in 2003 after the agency determined that any ill effects of olestra were mild and rare. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has campaigned against olestra for many years and opposed the lifting of the warning label. Its director of litigation, Stephen Gardner, accused Frito-Lay of trying to hide the consequences of eating products with olestra despite more than 20,000 consumer complaints. In a letter to the company Wednesday, Gardner said Perlow experienced cramps and gas for several hours after eating Ruffles Light cheddar potato chips. Perlow said she avoided eating Wow! chips because of olestra but didn’t realize Ruffles Light chips also contained the fake fat. The consumer group contends that Frito-Lay renamed the chips last year to fool consumers into thinking the snacks didn’t contain olestra. Gonzalez, the company spokeswoman, said bags of Light chips list olestra in the ingredients. Olean, the trademark name for olestra, is on the front of the packages. The use of olestra is also disclosed on the company’s Web site. Gonzalez said the company changed the name because Light “seemed to convey the product’s benefits much more than ‘Wow!’ did.” Wow! chips got off to a fast start in the late 1990s, but sales steadily crumbled. Frito-Lay even tested whether consumers would miss them by pulling the chips from some supermarket shelves. The Plano-based company declined to give sales figures for the Light products, but marketing research firm Information Resources Inc. estimated sales of Ruffles Light, Lay’s Light, Tostitos Light and Doritos Light at $120 million in the 12 months that ended Nov. 27. Those figures, which don’t include sales at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., paled next to sales of regular chips — the Lay’s line is worth more than $1 billion a year. But all the Light lines showed strong growth, the research firm said. Frito-Lay believes there is a big market for reduced-fat and fat-free chips. |