Federal appeals court rejects lawsuit pertaining to egg-labeling

Plaintiffs wanted egg cartons to include information on chicken housing

By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content
Farms.com

A panel of three judges from the ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit that would have required egg cartons to indicate the type of housing the chickens were raised in.

The plaintiffs, animal rights groups Compassion Over Killing, Animal Legal Defense Fund and six individual consumers brought the lawsuit to different government bodies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Agriculture Marketing Service (AMS) and Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

The plaintiffs argued cartons should be labeled as “free-range eggs,” “cage-free eggs,” or “eggs from caged hens.” The group also argued that eggs from caged hens are less nutritious and are at a higher risk for Salmonella. Current egg labeling standards are misleading, they said.

“The court is leaving the public in the dark regarding the environment of egg-laying hens,” Kelsey Eberly, a lawyer for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

But the panel ruled in favor of the federal agencies in part due to lack of evidence from the plaintiffs, according to court documents.

“The FDA specifically explained that it would not determine that this information was material because Plaintiffs had not provided persuasive evidence…,” these documents record.

The same documents outline that the FDA “explained that consumer interest in the hens’ living conditions, alone, is insufficient to establish that egg-production methods are a material fact that would permit the FDA to issue the requested regulations.”

Farms.com has reached out to United Egg Producers and various American egg farmers for their reactions to the ruling.