Cold Stone Creamery Faces Lawsuit Over Lack Of Real Pistachios In Pistachio Ice Cream

Is it nuts to assume a scoop of pistachio ice cream should contain actual pistachios? Or how about real butter in a dish of butter pecan?

Such weighty questions about a favorite summertime confection could soon be decided by the courts.

A federal judge in New York has given the go-ahead to a Long Island woman’s class action lawsuit that claims consumers are being duped by Cold Stone Creamery when they purchase certain flavors that “do not contain their represented ingredients.”

Lead plaintiff Jenna Marie Duncan purchased her serving of pistachio ice cream from a Cold Stone Creamery store in Levittown, New York, in or around July 2022. According her lawsuit, Duncan “reasonably believed that the Pistachio ice cream she purchased from defendant contained pistachio.”

But Duncan later learned after reading the company’s website there were no pistachios — a member of the cashew family — in the frozen dairy product, but rather “pistachio flavoring” that’s defined as a mixture of water, Ethanol, Propylene Glycol, natural and artificial flavor, Yellow 5, and Blue 1, according to the lawsuit.

“When consumers purchase pistachio ice cream, they expect pistachios, not a concoction of processed ingredients,” Duncan’s lawsuit reads, noting that competitors such as Haagen-Dazs use real pistachios in their ice cream.

Duncan also takes issue with the ingredients in Cold Stone’s mango, coconut, orange, mint, butter pecan ice creams and its orange sorbet.

A message was left by The Associated Press seeking comment from Duncan’s attorney.

U.S. District Court Judge Gary R. Brown, whose sometimes tongue-in-cheek court ruling is sprinkled with song lyrics about ice cream — from Louis Prima’s “Banana Split for My Baby” to Weird Al Yankovic’s “I