A “Healthy” Meal Kit With a Surgical Aftermath

Daily Harvest built its entire brand on the promise of convenient, nutritious food delivered to your door. The French Lentil + Leek Crumbles product was part of that promise. What the company apparently did not tell you was that the ingredient supply chain behind that product included tara flour — a substance sourced from Peru that plaintiffs allege was unreasonably dangerous, defective, and not fit for human consumption.

The lead plaintiff, Breeanne Buckley Peni, consumed the product and experienced fever, nausea, abdominal pain, chills, and joint pain. She was hospitalized. She subsequently had her gallbladder removed. The court documents are explicit: this is the direct, stated outcome for at least one person who trusted a product marketed as health food.

This was not an isolated incident. Around the same time Peni filed her lawsuit, a wave of related actions flooded New York federal and state courts. As of the filing of this settlement motion, 84 active lawsuits existed in New York courts alone, with 61 pending in the Southern District of New York. The court found the volume so large it issued a formal Coordination Order to manage them all together.

The Poison Pipeline: Four Companies, Two Countries

Understanding this case requires following the ingredient backward. Daily Harvest sold the product. Stone Gate Foods (operating as Second Bite Foods) manufactured it for Daily Harvest. Stone Gate used tara flour as an ingredient. That tara flour was supplied to Stone Gate by a company called Smirk’s Ltd. And Smirk’s sourced that flour from a Peruvian company called Molinos Asociados SAC.

At each step, someone handed off the tara flour without catching what plaintiffs allege was a dangerous defect. The settlement documents state that plaintiffs accused the ingredient suppliers of failing to exercise reasonable care in importation, testing, and distribution — and failing to adequately warn anyone about the dangers of consuming products containing this flour.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs describe this as a novel and unprecedented case — the first-ever litigation involving tara flour foodborne illness. That means no regulatory framework had been built around it. No warning labels existed. No prior settlements had established accountability. The consumers who bought this product were, in a very real sense, the test case for whether tara flour was safe — and they found out the hard way.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What No Settlement Can Buy Back

The settlement document is clinical in describing what happened to these people. Words like “gastrointestinal illness,” “personal injuries,” and “hospitalization” appear repeatedly, stripped of the visceral reality they represent. So let’s be direct: people ate what they believed was a clean, healthy, plant-based meal. Then their bodies started shutting down. Fever. Chills. Abdominal pain severe enough to require emergency care. Joint pain so bad it is specifically called out in the court filings. These are not abstract legal claims; these are symptoms that announce themselves in the middle of the night, that make you call someone in a panic, that make you afraid.

A Gallbladder Is Not a Small Thing to Lose

The lead plaintiff, Breeanne Buckley Peni, had her gallbladder removed. The court documents treat this as one data point in a larger claim. But a cholecystectomy — the surgical removal of the gallbladder — is a life-altering procedure. It changes how your body processes fat for the rest of your life. Many people who have had their gallbladders removed report chronic digestive issues, dietary restrictions they must maintain permanently, and recurring discomfort. The organ does not grow back. You do not get a refund on your biology. Peni will live the rest of her life with the consequences of trusting a product that the companies involved allegedly failed to make safe.

The settlement documents confirm she was hospitalized before the surgery. That means an emergency room or hospital admission, medical staff, tests, imaging, and then the decision to operate. Every stage of that process carries its own trauma — physical, emotional, and financial. The legal filing records her as a class representative, a named plaintiff, a vehicle for class certification. She is also a person who went to the hospital and came home without an organ she was born with.

449 People Whose Stories Became a Spreadsheet

The settlement covers 449 people currently represented by attorneys who have signed onto the agreement. The documents also reference “hundreds of claimants” whose medical records were exchanged during discovery, confirming that the scale of injury documented in this case extended well into the hundreds. Each of those people made the same basic error of trusting that a product on the market had been tested, that someone in the supply chain had done their job. Gastrointestinal illness can range from days of severe pain to weeks of debilitating symptoms. At the severe end — which this case clearly reached, given the hospitalizations — it means being unable to work, unable to care for children, unable to function.

The settlement document also explicitly covers “all persons in the United States who suffered consequential monetary damages arising from or related to another person’s personal injuries.” That language is doing heavy lifting. It covers spouses who missed work to care for sick partners. Parents who had to take time off to look after sick children. Caregivers who absorbed costs that a settlement spreadsheet will never fully capture. The harm here radiates outward from the injured person like a shockwave, touching everyone close to them.

The Insult Buried in the Fine Print

Here is a detail that deserves its own moment of outrage. The settlement document states that Smirk’s held back $753,712.16 (enough to fully fund the education costs for roughly 15 students at a public university for four years) from its insurance policies for “claims already made against the Citizens/Hanover policies” — meaning other, unrelated claims against Smirk’s from other incidents. The company that imported an ingredient that allegedly sent hundreds of people to the hospital was simultaneously managing other insurance claims from other harms. This is a corporation with a documented history of generating legal liability, whose product ended up inside a meal that took out someone’s gallbladder.

And the settlement itself represents “the remainder of Smirk’s insurance coverage.” Plaintiffs’ attorneys acknowledge this directly in the filing. The $7,671,000 (roughly what a starting quarterback earns in a single NFL game) is not a punitive amount wrung out of a negligent corporation to teach it a lesson. It is the leftover money from an insurance policy. The companies themselves — Smirk’s and Molinos — may have the financial capacity to pay more, a fact the filing acknowledges when it notes that “Smirk’s and Molinos together may have the ability to withstand a greater judgment.” The victims are getting what the insurance policy had left, not what the full harm demands.

Straight From the Documents: What They Actually Admitted

“After consuming the Product, Plaintiff experienced gastrointestinal illness and was hospitalized. Her initial symptoms included fever, nausea, abdominal pain, chills and joint pain. She subsequently had her gallbladder removed.” Settlement Motion, Factual and Procedural Background, p. 5

“The instant litigation alleging foodborne illness caused by the consumption of tara flour is the first of its kind, and the proposed $7,671,000 settlement represents the remainder of Smirk’s insurance coverage.” Settlement Motion, Point I, Section C.7, p. 23

“Whether Settling Defendants failed to exercise reasonable care in the importation, testing, and distribution of the food ingredient to ensure that it was not unreasonably dangerous, defective, adulterated, and or otherwise not fit for human consumption prior to its incorporation into a larger food product.” Settlement Motion, Point II, Section B.2, p. 28-29 — Common Question #2 of the Class

“Whether Settling Defendants failed to adequately warn Plaintiff and the putative Class of the dangers that accompanied the use and consumption of any product that contained tara flour as an ingredient, here specifically French Lentil + Leek Crumbles.” Settlement Motion, Point II, Section B.2, p. 29 — Common Question #4 of the Class

“Although Smirk’s and Molinos together may have the ability to withstand a greater judgment, the outstanding result — a $7,671,000 settlement — is still fair, reasonable, and adequate to compensate the proposed Settlement Class.” Settlement Motion, Point I, Section C.6, p. 22

Societal Impact: This Was Always Bigger Than One Product

Public Health: An Unregulated Ingredient in Your Meal Kit

Plaintiffs’ attorneys explicitly state this is the first litigation of its kind involving tara flour as a foodborne illness vector. That means, before this case, no regulatory body had established safety thresholds for tara flour in consumer food products based on real-world mass illness data. Hundreds of people got sick and had to be hospitalized before the safety record on this ingredient was written. The plaintiffs — the sick people — were essentially the clinical trial.

The legal standard being applied here asks whether Smirk’s and Molinos placed “a food ingredient that was unreasonably dangerous, defective, adulterated, and/or otherwise not fit for human consumption” into the supply chain. The court documents confirm that scientific studies about the use of tara flour in food were exchanged during discovery — meaning these studies existed. The question the litigation raises, though not definitively answers in this settlement document, is whether the companies involved had access to that science and moved forward anyway, or whether they simply never looked.

Either answer is a public health failure. If they had the science and ignored it, that is deliberate negligence. If they never tested it, that is a systemic gap in how the food industry vets novel ingredients before they reach consumers at scale. Daily Harvest was a subscription meal kit service — meaning it shipped this product directly to customers’ homes at regular intervals. This was not a one-time exposure for most customers. Subscribers received repeat deliveries. The exposure window for this ingredient was not a single meal; it was an ongoing dietary pattern for a paying subscriber base.

Economic Inequality: Who Actually Pays When a Corporation Harms You

The settlement structure reveals something important about who bears the cost of corporate negligence in America. The $7,671,000 (enough to cover roughly two years of median household income for 128 American families) total settlement is split across hundreds of claimants, then reduced further by administrative costs of up to $500,000, and then attorney fees are taken from each individual claimant’s award via their retainer agreements. The people who were harmed receive a fraction of the headline settlement number.

The document includes a particularly telling provision: unrepresented claimants — people who filed claims without a lawyer — have their settlement award automatically reduced by one-third. The filing frames this as a mechanism to achieve equity between represented and unrepresented claimants by depositing the fee equivalent back into the fund. But the practical reality is this: if you were harmed, got sick, and could not afford or did not know to hire a lawyer, the system treats your claim as worth less. The people most likely to navigate this process without representation are the people with the fewest resources, the least legal literacy, and the most precarious financial situations — exactly the people who subscribed to a meal kit service because they were trying to eat well on a manageable budget.

The defendants can also hold back funds based on the number of people who opt out of the settlement. If enough people opt out and pursue individual claims, Smirk’s gets to set aside additional money before the settlement fund is finalized. The class members who stay in the settlement do not know the exact financial value of what they are accepting until after the opt-out period closes. They are asked to make a legal decision — one that permanently releases their claims — before knowing the full number. That is not a process designed to protect consumers. It is a process designed to manage corporate exposure.

What Now? Don’t Let This End With a Settlement Check

The Corporate Roles That Enabled This

Regulatory Watchlist: Who Should Be Asking Questions Right Now

The FDA has a page on this recall: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investigation-adverse-event-reports-french-lentil-leek-crumbles-june-2022

The FDA page also had a link to an archive of the recall notice: https://web.archive.org/web/20250308094455/https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety-alerts/daily-harvest-issues-voluntary-recall-french-lentil-leek-crumbles-due-potential-health-risk

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