A Woman Is Suing Jelly Belly Because She Didn’t Know Jelly Beans Contain Sugar

A woman in California has filed a class-action lawsuit on the grounds that Jelly Belly jelly beans are tricking customers into thinking the don’t contain sugar, and this lawsuit is pretty surprising, even in a world where people are constantly suing for things like Nutella not being healthful, or Welch’s fruit snacks not being actual fruit. Those were ridiculous, but you could kind of see where the person was coming from if you looked at the situation sideways. (Nutella is made with nuts. Fruit snacks are … shaped like fruit.) But now a California woman is suing the makers of Jelly Belly jelly beans because … wait for it … she didn’t know her jelly beans contained sugar.

According to Forbes, a California woman says she was “mislead” into buying Jelly Belly Sport Beans, which are basically the Gatorade of jelly beans, in that they’re jelly beans that are advertised as an exercise supplement because they contain “carbohydrates, electrolytes, and vitamins.” A lot of those carbohydrates are sugar, though, and that’s where the problem lies.

The ingredients list includes “evaporated cane juice,” which is sugar, but the plaintiff named Jessica Gomez says that is fancy phrasing designed to mislead people into thinking the product doesn’t contain sugar. According to her lawsuit, she alleges that she and other intensive athletes have been buying the Jelly Belly Sport Beans and eating them to sustain intense exercise, not knowing that they were actually just eating jelly beans that were full of sugar.

This is what the Nutrition Facts panel on a package of Jelly Belly Sport Beans looks like, according to Amazon:

A 28-gram packages contains 17 grams of sugars. That’s about 60 percent sugar.

Jelly Belly has responded to Gomez’s lawsuit saying that it is complete nonsense.

”No reasonable consumer could have been deceived by Sport Beans’ labeling Gomez could not have seen ”˜evaporated cane juice’ without also seeing the product’s sugar content on its Nutrition Facts panel,” the company said.

Jelly Belly’s Sports Beans are a ridiculous product, but the nutrition information is right there on the label. Jelly beans are not health food, no matter now “extreme” the font on the front of the package looks.

(Image: iStockPhoto / daniel_wiedemann)