What Costco Actually Stole From You

You were tired. Maybe it was a Tuesday. Maybe the kids needed to be somewhere in an hour, or you were feeding an elderly parent, or you were just trying to get one thing right in a week that had already beaten you down. You walked past the rotisserie chickens at Costco — the ones under the heat lamps, golden and smelling like something your grandmother would have made — and you saw the sign. “No Preservatives.” And for a moment, something in you relaxed.

That matters. It matters because that moment of relief — that small exhale when you think you’ve made a good choice for your family — is precisely what Costco was selling. They built a sign, placed it above the chickens at eye level, and let it do the work. Not a whisper. A declaration. Prominent. Unqualified. Final.

You were not being paranoid or gullible. You were doing exactly what you are supposed to do: reading the information a company chose to place directly in front of your face. Research on consumer behavior backs this up. People reasonably place more trust in large, conspicuous point-of-sale claims than in fine-print ingredient lists. Costco knows this. Every marketing department at every major food company knows this. That’s why the sign was big and the ingredient list was small.

Bianca Johnston drove to a Victorville Costco on December 9, 2024. She saw the sign. She made the same reasonable choice you probably have made at some point. She bought the chicken. She fed it to people she cares about. Then she found out. Anatasia Chernov bought two of them in San Marcos on February 17, 2025 — two, because Costco made her believe she could trust the product. She found out too.

Finding out is its own kind of harm. You start to recount every time you made that purchase, every time you told someone the chicken was “clean.” The trust you extended to a trillion-dollar corporation was used against you. You did not receive what you paid for, and the company had every reason to know it. The money is recoverable. That version of trust is not.

Costco is a company with net sales exceeding $200 billion annually. Its rotisserie chicken is one of its most famous products — a loss leader designed to pull you into the warehouse and keep you there. The “No Preservatives” claim is part of that product’s identity. It is not an accident. It is a marketing decision, made by people who knew the ingredient list and chose the sign anyway.

What the Complaint Actually Says: Quoted Verbatim

These are the words from the court filing itself — Case 3:26-cv-00403-AJB-AHG, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California on January 22, 2026. No paraphrase. No spin. Read it in their own words.

• The use of “systemically” is not an accident. It means the lawyers are arguing this was a company-wide, ongoing practice — not a rogue label or an isolated error. The phrase “tens — if not hundreds — of millions of dollars” establishes the financial scale of the alleged fraud and sets the floor for what class-wide damages might look like.
• This single paragraph is the foundation for federal jurisdiction. The Class Action Fairness Act requires the amount in controversy to exceed $5,000,000. Alleging figures in the hundreds of millions signals the lawyers believe discovery will surface evidence of an enormous number of affected purchases.

• The complaint does not just say “these are preservatives.” It identifies the specific biochemical mechanisms by which sodium phosphate acts as a preservative: pH buffering, metal ion chelation, and fat oxidation reduction. Each mechanism individually qualifies as a preservative function under FDA definitions at 21 C.F.R. § 101.22(a)(5).
• By naming the specific science, the lawyers are pre-empting a defense argument that these chemicals serve some other primary purpose. The argument is: whatever else these additives do, they perform preservative functions — and that alone makes the “No Preservatives” claim false.

• This paragraph is critical because it dismantles Costco’s most likely defense: “the ingredients were on the label.” The complaint argues that a fine-print ingredient list — without any explanation of what those ingredients do — cannot legally counteract a large, conspicuous, unqualified “No Preservatives” claim.
• The phrase “if at all” is a signal that the plaintiffs may be prepared to argue the disclosure was functionally nonexistent for the average consumer. Federal courts have upheld this reasoning in prior food-labeling deception cases.

• “Malicious, fraudulent, and wanton” is the threshold language for punitive damages in California. If a court or jury accepts this characterization, Costco could face damages that go well beyond compensating individual buyers — punitive damages are designed to punish and deter.
• The phrase “intentionally and knowingly” means the plaintiffs will attempt to prove at trial that Costco’s leadership was aware the product contained preservatives at the same time they were running the “No Preservatives” marketing campaign. Internal communications, formulation records, and marketing decision logs will likely be targets in discovery.

• The phrase “knew or should have known” covers two scenarios: either Costco’s team actively knew the claim was false, or Costco was so willfully uninformed about its own product and market that it failed a basic standard of care. Either way, the complaint argues Costco is liable.
• “Consumer trends within the industry” refers to the documented, publicly available surge in demand for preservative-free, clean-label food products. The argument is that Costco was actively capitalizing on this trend with a false claim while the trend itself was making national business news.

Who Gets Hurt When a Company Lies About Food

Public Health

Preservative-free labeling carries real health significance for specific populations. When that label is false, the harm is concrete, not theoretical.

• People with kidney disease are medically advised to limit phosphate intake. Sodium phosphate in food is a direct concern for this population, which includes millions of Americans with chronic kidney disease. A person managing their phosphate load, who relies on a “No Preservatives” label to guide dietary choices, is being actively deceived at the point of care.
• Carrageenan is a substance with an established controversy inside nutritional science. It has been linked in some research to gastrointestinal inflammation and gut permeability issues. Consumers who specifically avoid carrageenan for health reasons — particularly those managing Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, or colitis — would have had no reason to suspect it was present in a product marketed as free of additives.
• The complaint cites documented consumer research showing that demand for preservative-free food has been driven specifically by “heightened awareness of the health risks of artificial preservatives.” People are making these choices because they have a reason to. A false claim intercepts that choice before it can be made.
• The FDA’s own definition of “preservative” at 21 C.F.R. § 101.22(a)(5) encompasses any ingredient “that, when added to food tends to prevent or retard deterioration thereof.” Both sodium phosphate and carrageenan satisfy this definition. The federal standard exists precisely because consumers are entitled to know when their food contains these substances.
• Costco sells food in bulk quantities. A single rotisserie chicken purchase feeds multiple people. False labeling on a bulk-format product multiplies the scope of exposure per purchase compared to single-serving items.

Economic Inequality

The $4.99 Costco rotisserie chicken is famous precisely because it is marketed as a cheap, healthy shortcut for families who cannot afford premium organic food. The “No Preservatives” claim is part of that value proposition. Stripping it away reveals a two-tier system where information is used as a commodity.

• Costco’s rotisserie chicken is sold as a loss leader — priced below cost to drive warehouse traffic. The “No Preservatives” claim layers a health premium onto a price-point product, allowing Costco to extract consumer trust that normally commands a higher price without providing the underlying quality that trust represents.
• Wealthier consumers who can afford premium butcher chickens or organic birds are insulated from this deception. They have more options, more information resources, and less reliance on a single mass-market retailer’s marketing claims. The people most likely to depend on Costco’s rotisserie chicken as a primary protein source are working-class families making genuine dietary decisions based on the label.
• The complaint alleges that plaintiffs “would have paid significantly less” for the chicken had they known the truth — or would not have bought it at all. When the product is already priced as a budget item, even a marginal price premium built on a false health claim represents a disproportionate extraction from lower-income budgets.
• Class membership is expected to number in the “hundreds of thousands, if not millions.” The relatively small individual loss per purchase is precisely why class action litigation exists — individual consumers cannot access the legal system to recover $5 or $10. Costco’s scale means even small per-unit fraud accumulates into what the complaint describes as “tens — if not hundreds — of millions of dollars.”
• Consumers who lack chemistry backgrounds have no independent means of evaluating whether “sodium phosphate” on an ingredient list functions as a preservative. The information asymmetry is total: Costco formulates the product, Costco knows the biochemistry, and Costco chose the sign. The buyer brings none of that knowledge to the transaction.

What the Numbers Actually Mean

This Lawsuit Is Live. Here Is What You Can Do About It.

The case is active in federal court. The class has not yet been certified. That process determines who counts as a class member and whether individual lawyers or a coordinated class structure will pursue this case. Here is who is responsible, where to file complaints, and how to push back.

Who Is Named and Who Is Responsible

• Costco Wholesale Corporation: Named defendant. Washington corporation, principal place of business in Issaquah, Washington. The company responsible for the marketing, formulation, and sale of the Kirkland Signature Seasoned Rotisserie Chicken.
• Does 1–10: Unknown individuals and entities who “assist, participate, and/or otherwise facilitate the unlawful actions described in this Complaint.” The complaint reserves the right to name them once discovery reveals their identities. This likely includes marketing agencies, product development teams, or contract formulators.
• Attorneys on record for plaintiffs: Wesley M. Griffith (SBN 286390), David A. McGee, and Loc G. Ho of Almeida Law Group, LLC. Contact information is in the source document linked below.

Regulatory Watchlist: File a Complaint

• FDA (Food and Drug Administration): The FDA defines preservatives at 21 C.F.R. § 101.22(a)(5) and regulates food labeling. A consumer complaint about false “No Preservatives” labeling is squarely within the FDA’s jurisdiction. File at: reportaproblem.food.fda.gov
• FTC (Federal Trade Commission): The FTC enforces truth-in-advertising rules. A company-wide, multi-channel marketing campaign making a false health claim about a food product is exactly the kind of deceptive advertising the FTC investigates. File at: reportfraud.ftc.gov
• California Department of Consumer Affairs: California’s consumer protection agencies enforce the CLRA, UCL, and FAL — the three California statutes named in this lawsuit. File complaints at: dca.ca.gov
• Washington State Attorney General: The complaint states that plaintiffs will serve the Washington Attorney General with a copy because they are seeking injunctive relief under the Washington Consumer Protection Act (Rev. Code Wash. § 19.86.095). File at: atg.wa.gov/file-complaint
• Your State Attorney General: If you purchased a Costco rotisserie chicken in any state other than California or Washington and believe you were deceived by the “No Preservatives” label, file a complaint with your own state’s AG office. Consumer fraud divisions exist in every state.

Mutual Aid, Organizing, and Grassroots Resistance

• Share the actual court filing. The source document is attached below. Screenshots of official legal complaints are harder to dismiss than social media posts. Put the paragraph numbers in your caption.
• If you purchased a Kirkland Signature Seasoned Rotisserie Chicken and relied on the “No Preservatives” claim, preserve your receipts. Costco membership accounts log purchase history. Screenshot your order history now, before anything changes.
• Contact Almeida Law Group directly if you believe you are a class member. Their contact details are in the court filing attached below. The class has not yet been certified — early contact with class counsel can strengthen the record.
• Support independent food science journalism. Organizations that test food products independently — including food safety advocacy groups and university food science departments — are the last line of verification between you and a corporate marketing department. Fund them.
• Demand clean-label transparency from every food retailer you use. Use the Costco rotisserie chicken case as a template when engaging with store managers, customer service departments, and brand social media accounts. Corporate behavior changes faster when customers ask specific, documented questions in public forums.