New Yorker taking on snacking giant Blue Diamond over misbranding

A New York woman is roasting almond giant Blue Diamond, claiming in a new class-action lawsuit that its nuts are misbranded to fool people into thinking they’re naturally smoked.

Harlem’s Leela O’Connor says shoppers are duped into thinking the nuts are roasted over a real wood fire, when in reality, they’re just doused with liquid smoke.

The almonds’ packaging, “emblazoned on a red banner, with orange edges, evocative of fire,” made her picture a smokehouse or the burning of hardwoods in nature, she claimed in her Manhattan Supreme Court filing against the company.

O’Connor, 48, felt cheated when the fine print revealed an ingredient called “natural hickory smoke flavor,” she claimed.

“Natural hickory smoke flavor is another name for the ‘quasi-toxic’ additive, ‘liquid smoke,’ that results from ‘somehow turning smoke into a liquid,’” she fumed in court papers.

She cited Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement as motivation for her legal claim.

“An increasing number of consumers seek to avoid ‘fake foods,’ which are based on highly processed and/or chemically manufactured substances,” O’Connor said in the litigation, referring to the Health Secretary’s crusade against additives.

The European Union voted last year to ban liquid smoke, an ingredient used in marinades, processed meats and even the McRib, after research from the European Food Safety Authority linked it to cancer.

To add insult to injury, O’Connor said she paid more for the almonds, $4.19, than she would have, had she known they were not made in a smokehouse.

“These almonds have never seen the inside of a smokehouse,” insisted Long Island attorney Spencer Sheehan, who’s filed the suit, which seeks unspecified damages.

Sheehan, one of the country’s most prolific consumer class-action lawyers, earned the nicknamed the “vanilla vigilante” because he’s gone after companies using fake vanilla flavoring in their food so many times.

In 2022, he reached a $2.6 million settlement with Blue Diamond in a proposed federal class action case against the company’s misleading vanilla-flavored Almond Breeze milk.

“Blue Diamond has been cheating the public for a long time,” he told The Post. “New Yorkers don’t like fake things.”

Last year, a similar class-action suit was filed in Illinois. 

“We are disappointed that Mr. Sheehan has decided to pursue yet another case challenging the labeling of Blue Diamond’s Smokehouse almonds,” Rachael Kessler, the company’s outside counsel, told The Post.