Don Barrett, a Mississippi lawyer, took in hundreds of millions of dollars a decade ago after suing Big Tobacco and winning record settlements from R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris and other cigarette makers. So did Walter Umphrey, Dewitt M. Lovelace and Stuart and Carol Nelkin.

Ever since, the lawyers have been searching for big paydays in business, scoring more modest wins against car companies, drug makers, brokerage firms and insurers. Now, they have found the next target: food manufacturers.

More than a dozen lawyers who took on the tobacco companies have filed 25 cases against industry players like ConAgra Foods, PepsiCo, Heinz, General Mills and Chobani that stock pantry shelves and refrigerators across America.
The suits, filed over the last four months, assert that food makers are misleading consumers and violating federal regulations by wrongly labelling products and ingredients. While they join a barrage of litigation against the industry in recent years, the group of tobacco lawyers is moving aggressively. They are asking a federal court in California to halt ConAgra's sales of Pam cooking spray, Swiss Miss cocoa products and some Hunt's canned tomatoes.

"It's a crime-and that makes it a crime to sell it," said Barrett, citing what he contends is the mislabelling of those products. "That means these products should be taken off the shelves."

The food companies counter that the suits are without merit, another example of litigation gone wild and driven largely by the lawyers' financial motivations. Barrett said his group could seek damages amounting to four years of sales of mislabelled products-which could total many billions of dollars.

"It's difficult to take some of these claims seriously, for instance, that a consumer was deceived into believing that a chocolate hazelnut spread for bread was healthy for children," said Kristen E. Polovoy, an industry lawyer at Montgomery McCracken, referring to a lawsuit that two mothers brought against the maker of Nutella. "I think the courts are starting to look at the implausibility of some of these suits."

A federal judge in California in 2009 dismissed a case against PepsiCo, which accused the company of false advertising because Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries cereal does not contain real berries. He ruled that "a reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the product in the instant case contained a fruit that does not exist."

While the lawyers are being questioned about their motives, they are not alone in pursuing the food industry. In recent weeks, the Centre for Science in the Public Interest has filed two lawsuits against General Mills and McNeil Nutritionals over their claims on Nature Valley and Splenda Essentials products, and warned Welch's it would sue unless the company changed the wording on its juice and fruit snacks. The Federal Trade Commission won settlements from companies like Dannon and Pom Wonderful for claims about the health benefits of their products.