Nestle Nailed with Second Lawsuit Over False Poland Spring Water Claims [UPDATE]

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Nine plaintiffs who reside in the Northeast have put their names on a proposed class action lawsuit that alleges defendant Nestle Waters North America, Inc. has for years misled consumers about the true sources of its ostensibly 100 percent natural Poland Spring water. The whopping 246-page complaint alleges Poland Spring water does not flow from water sources that comply with the FDA’s definition of “spring water,” and that Nestle, year after year, misidentifies “hundreds of millions of gallons” of its product as coming from one or more of eight “natural springs” in Maine.

“Rather than being ‘100% Natural Spring Water’ as [Nestle’s] labels advertise, and rather than being collected from pristine mountain or forest springs as the images on those labels depict, Poland Spring Water products all contain ordinary groundwater that [the defendant] collects from wells it drilled in saturated plains or valleys where the water table is within a few feet of the earth’s surface,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit goes so far as to allege it’s mathematically impossible for Nestle to produce true spring water at the rates at which it claims. Worse, the case wages no one has ever even seen the springs from which the defendant claims its water originates, in part because, as the suit alleges, some ran dry “nearly 50 years ago.” From the lawsuit (emphasis ours):

On a grander scale, the case claims Nestle has laid a more than 20-year “pattern of deception” in building Poland Spring into the country’s most valuable bottled water brand, adding “at least 13 million consumers nationwide buy Poland Spring Water under false and deceptive circumstances every year.” The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction for Nestle to remove its allegedly misleadingly labeled Poland Spring bottles from store shelves, as well as for the company to be precluded from labeling any future products as “100% Natural Spring Water.”