In Wertymer v. Walmart, Inc., — F.4th —-, 2025 WL 1802402 (7th Cir. July 1, 2025), the Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision to dismiss a consumer class action which was based on speculative and contradictory assertions that a product marketed as “raw honey” was not actually raw.

Plaintiff alleges that he purchased two bottles of Walmart Great Value brand honey in June 2022, one labeled “Raw Honey” and the other labeled “Organic Raw Honey.”  Plaintiff later submitted these products to be tested by a laboratory which allegedly determined that the honey was not raw, and then brought false advertising claims. 

Although the district court dismissed on reasonable consumer grounds, the Seventh Circuit affirmed on a different basis:  whether Plaintiff stated a plausible claim that the honey was actually mislabeled.  Id. at *2.  Both parties and the Court relied on the United States Department of Agriculture definition of raw honey, which defined it as “honey as it exists in the beehive or as obtained by extraction, but not filtered…”  Id. at *3.  Plaintiff first made an extended chain of inferences that raw honey cannot be heated, and that a chemical test for an enzyme called “HMF” can be used as a proxy for determining whether honey has been heated.  The Court found this too speculative because Plaintiff’s own complaint and cited sources state that HMF levels can be impacted by a myriad of other factors including length of storage, geographic location of harvesting, and the chemical composition of the honey, all of which were “obvious alternative explanations” for the complaint’s factual allegations.  Id. at *4–5. 

The Court then analyzed each of Plaintiff’s cited sources regarding the importance of the HMF value, including a peer-reviewed chemistry journal, a European food testing laboratory, and the website of a New Zealand honey producer.  The Seventh Circuit found that each of these sources were either irrelevant to Plaintiff’s argument or explicitly acknowledged that multiple factors could influence the HMF number in a sample.  Id. at *6–7.  The Court concluded by dismissing Plaintiff’s argument that the “Raw Organic Honey” was processed because it had a high presence of mannose, a type of sugar.  The Seventh Circuit found that Plaintiff failed to plausibly allege that elevated mannose levels meant the honey was processed, because this was not supported by Plaintiff’s cited authority and because those sources acknowledged that mannose can be naturally present in honey.  Id. at *8.  In sum, because Plaintiff’s deceptive labeling claims were based on highly speculative and contradictory assertions, the Seventh Circuit affirmed dismissal for failure to state a claim.