No Preservatives, Plenty of Litigation: Costco’s Rotisserie Chicken Goes to Court

Costco sells roughly 157 million Kirkland Signature Seasoned Rotisserie Chickens a year, and it has held the price at 4.99 dollars apiece for so long that the number itself has become part of the brand. That pricing discipline is now showing up in a federal court record. Two California shoppers sued Costco in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in January 2026, claiming the retailer’s no preservatives signage amounted to false advertising, and Costco answered in June with a motion to dismiss calling the claim fatally flawed. Beneath the back and forth sits a question courts have wrestled with for decades and that this case may finally sharpen for the grocery aisle: what does a reasonable consumer actually understand a food label to mean.

The Allegations

Plaintiffs Bianca Johnston of Big Bear and Anastasia Chernov of Escondido built their case around two added ingredients, sodium phosphate and carrageenan, which they say function as preservatives even though the product is marketed as free of them. According to the complaint, sodium phosphate buffers pH, binds metal ions and slows fat oxidation, effects the plaintiffs say collectively inhibit microbial growth and spoilage, while carrageenan, drawn from seaweed, preserves texture and extends shelf life. Put plainly, the theory is that the chicken’s own ingredient list contradicts its marketing, and that Costco knew preservative content is material to how reasonable consumers decide what to feed their families.

From that premise the complaint asks for quite a lot. It seeks class certification for every American who bought the chicken, plus a California subclass, along with unspecified damages and an order barring Costco from advertising the product as preservative free. Plaintiffs’ counsel, Wesley M. Griffith of Almeida Law Group, put the argument bluntly in a public statement, saying Costco’s own label undercuts its marketing and that the mismatch is both unlawful and unfair. That framing sets up the legal question the rest of the case turns on, which statutes actually reach this kind of mismatch and what they require a plaintiff to prove.

The Statutes in Play

The suit pleads violations of California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act and Unfair Competition Law, California’s False Advertising Law and Washington’s Consumer Protection Act, the last chosen because Costco is headquartered in Issaquah. Each statute borrows some version of the reasonable consumer standard that has shaped false advertising litigation across the food and beverage industry for years, most visibly in the wave of natural, healthy and clean label suits that preceded this one. None of them asks whether a sophisticated chemist would understand sodium phosphate’s function. They ask whether an ordinary shopper reading a no preservatives sign would be misled, which is exactly the ground Costco chose to fight on.

Costco’s Motion to Dismiss

Costco removed the no preservatives signage shortly after the suit was filed, telling reporters it wanted consistency between in store signs, online listings and the printed ingredient panel. It maintained then, and maintains now, that sodium phosphate and carrageenan support moisture retention, texture and product consistency during cooking and are approved by food safety authorities. That position hardened into a formal challenge on June 4, 2026, when Costco’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss arguing the theory does not survive contact with the plaintiffs’ own sources, which Costco says do not classify either ingredient as a preservative, or with federal labeling regulations, which Costco says treat the two compounds as seasoning agents rather than preservatives.

Costco then turned to the damages theory itself. The complaint alleges the no preservatives claim let Costco charge a premium price, so the motion points out that the chicken has sold for 4.99 dollars before, during and after the litigation and argues that an unchanged price forecloses any claim of premium pricing. As the motion put it, the price stayed the same, so there was no premium and never was one. A hearing is expected in mid August 2026, and how the court handles that pricing argument alongside the labeling argument will say a great deal about where this case is headed.

Why the Reasonable Consumer Standard Will Decide This

California’s reasonable consumer test asks whether a significant portion of the public is likely to be deceived by a label, not whether any individual consumer might misread it, and that framing favors Costco’s strongest argument, which is regulatory and definitional. If neither the Food and Drug Administration nor the plaintiffs’ own cited authorities classify sodium phosphate or carrageenan as preservatives, a court may find the gap between marketing and ingredient list too narrow to mislead a reasonable shopper, particularly where the function the plaintiffs describe, moisture retention and texture, is also disclosed on the same label as a seasoning purpose.

The plaintiffs are not without an answer, though it runs along a different axis. Food law has long recognized that an ingredient can perform a preservative function regardless of its formal regulatory category, and the complaint leans on that functional argument rather than on FDA nomenclature. How the court resolves that tension between definition and function will likely determine whether the case proceeds to discovery or ends at the pleading stage.

A Second Suit in the Background

The preservative case is not Costco’s only rotisserie chicken exposure this year, and the second suit gives the first some useful context. A separate proposed class action filed in February by a Missouri shopper, Lisa Taylor, targets Lincoln Premium Poultry, the Nebraska processing plant Costco built in 2019 to control its own supply chain, alleging persistent salmonella contamination and seeking damages for chicken purchased since 2019. The two suits proceed on different legal theories, food safety negligence in one case and false advertising in the other, but together they test how far a retailer can lean on a loss leader product before its marketing and its supply chain practices draw the same scrutiny as a premium brand.

The Practical Lesson for Food and Consumer Brands

Whatever the court decides on the motion to dismiss, the case is a useful reminder for any business making a clean label or free from claim, in food or otherwise. Marketing claims that turn on a technical or regulatory definition need real legal vetting before they go on a sign, a website or a product label, not after a demand letter arrives. Costco’s decision to pull the signage as soon as the suit was filed likely helped its premium pricing argument, but it did not make the underlying labeling question go away. The companies that fare best in this kind of dispute pair a strong factual record, meaning ingredient function, regulatory classification and consistent pricing, with a quick correction the moment a claim is challenged, rather than digging in on marketing language their own ingredient panel undercuts.