SEATTLE — Some of the nation’s biggest retailers and grocery chains — Costco Wholesale Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp., Safeway Inc. and Wild Oats Markets Inc. — sold “organic” milk that wasn’t organic, according to recently filed lawsuits.
The federal complaints focus on the stores’ sale of milk from Colorado-based Aurora Organic Dairy, which recently agreed to change its practices after the U.S. Department of Agriculture found more than a dozen violations of organic standards.
The stores sell Aurora’s milk under their own in-house brand names, such as Costco’s Kirkland and Target’s Archer Farms, in cartons marked “USDA organic,” typically with pictures of pastures or other bucolic scenes.
“That’s not even close to the reality of where this milk was coming from,” said Steve Berman, a Seattle lawyer whose firm is among those suing. “These cows are all penned in factory-confinement conditions.”
The lawsuits seek class-action status on behalf of people who bought the milk, and ask for their money back as well as punitive damages and attorneys’ fees. Consumers typically pay more for organic food because they believe it is free of hormones or pesticides and produced with greater respect for the environment.
The legal disputes are the latest front in the battle over the organic food movement, with large corporate players insisting that they can do organic farming on a large scale, and sustainable family farms complaining that such operations aren’t really organic and contribute to surpluses that drive down prices, making it harder for them to compete.
At the center is Aurora, of Boulder, Colo., one of the nation’s largest dairies certified organic by the USDA. After a progressive farm-policy organization complained about Aurora’s operations, the USDA last spring proposed revoking its organic certification for more than a dozen “willful violations” of the 1990 Organic Foods Production Act from 2003 to 2006. Among them: that cows had little access to pasture, that Aurora moved its cows back and forth between conventional and organic farms, and that it sold milk as organic that did not meet federal standards.
The lawsuits cite those findings as evidence that the milk Aurora produced was falsely labeled as organic.
Aurora agreed to change some of its practices in a settlement with the USDA this summer, said Aurora spokeswoman Sonja Tuitele. But it was allowed to keep its organic certification and was put on probation for a year.
“Any lawsuits claiming the milk we were selling was not organic have no merit,” she said.
Aurora itself has been sued by some consumers, but lawsuits filed in federal court in Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis and San Francisco in the last two weeks are the first to accuse the retailers of misleading their customers into paying higher prices for milk they believed was organic.
Several of the companies declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment, but Target, of Minneapolis, said it stands behind Aurora’s organic milk, which it sells as Archer Farms.
But Mark Kastel, co-founder of the Cornucopia Institute in Wisconsin, said the USDA should have revoked Aurora’s certification. The Cornucopia Institute is not involved in the lawsuits, but investigated Aurora and brought it to the USDA’s attention, and Kastel said his group plans to sue the USDA.
“The USDA is ultimately responsible … but it does not absolve the retailers from doing due diligence to make sure what they’re representing is accurate, especially when they’re putting their own name on the label,” he said.
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