Despite protestations from the company, a federal judge has decided to move forward on a lawsuit against McCormick & Co., the popular spice maker. The lawsuit has to do with the size of McCormick’s ground pepper tins. A smaller player in the spice industry, Watkins Inc., filed a lawsuit against McCormick last year, claiming that the latter had reduced the amount of pepper in its tins by 25% while still using the same size tin. The old McCormick tins contained about 8 ounces of ground pepper. After the switch, the tins now contain about 6 ounces of ground pepper. Despite this reduction in quantity the size of the tin has in fact remained the same. Watkins claims that this means that McCormick is using a visual trick to make it seem like they are selling more pepper per tin than they really are.
Watkins and McCormick sell the same product, but their marketing techniques are different. McCormick has non see-through containers that obscure the amount of product that they contain. Watkins has a smaller-sized container even though they contain the same amount as McCormick’s. That’s why Watkins is suing McCormick. They claim that McCormick is trying to deceive customers and get a leg up on their competition without actually improving their product. It is true that the McCormick tins state how much pepper they contain, but the tiny “6 oz.” marker is in small font that would be difficult to discern at first glance. The industry term for this is “slack-filling,” which essentially means underfilling. Watkins argues that this practice is so deceptive as to constitute a breach of consumer protection laws.