The Facts

On March 5, 2019, the Food and Drug Administration told an anonymous correspondent that it was reviewing her concerns about CaramelCrisp, LLC, the company that operates Garrett Popcorn Shops. Two days later, CaramelCrisp terminated Aisha Putnam, the employee who had sent the messages.

That timing supplied the case’s most immediate suspicion. It didn’t supply the evidence the federal appeals court required: proof that anyone responsible for Putnam’s termination knew she had contacted the FDA.

Putnam joined CaramelCrisp in March 2014 and eventually became its director of research and development. She worked mainly at an offsite kitchen that developed products and produced popcorn for online orders. Her responsibilities also included quality assurance and monitoring compliance with food-safety laws.

According to the court’s account, Putnam repeatedly complained to management about inaccurate nutrition labels, a plan to repackage expiring chocolate, and a roof and ceiling leak that she believed could compromise food safety. She said the company promised corrections but didn’t address her concerns.

Those are documented reports by Putnam, not judicial findings that CaramelCrisp violated food-safety law. The opinion doesn’t say that contaminated or incorrectly labeled products reached customers. It also doesn’t document any resulting injury.

What Putnam Said Happened at Work

Putnam alleged that her position deteriorated as her complaints continued. She said responsibilities were reassigned, she was excluded from meetings and hiring discussions, managers yelled at her, and her supervisor eventually stopped speaking with her and left her out of work discussions.

In late February 2019, Putnam used a pseudonymous email account to send the FDA a list of alleged violations at the offsite kitchen. She said a food-safety consultant working for CaramelCrisp had recommended contacting the agency. After receiving no immediate response, she followed up in early March.

CaramelCrisp offered a different explanation for the employment decision. It said managers had discussed eliminating Putnam’s position months earlier because a new quality-assurance specialist had been hired and Putnam was allegedly neglecting her research responsibilities. Putnam disputed that account, maintaining that food-safety oversight remained part of her job.

The record didn’t identify who made the final termination decision. It established only that Putnam’s supervisor wasn’t the ultimate decision-maker.

The Knowledge Gap

The Food Safety Modernization Act protects workers who report actual or reasonably believed violations of federal food law. In its first decision setting out the elements of an FSMA retaliation claim, the Seventh Circuit said a worker must establish four things:

Putnam’s FDA theory stopped at the second step. The court said she produced no evidence identifying the final decision-maker and no evidence that anyone who might have made the decision knew about the anonymous messages.

She pointed to testimony from a plant superintendent who said he “probably talked” with an operations director about an unidentified employee approaching management with “rumblings.” The court found that too vague to support a reasonable inference that management knew Putnam had contacted the FDA.

That ruling didn’t find CaramelCrisp’s explanation for the firing true. Summary judgment instead removed the FDA-email theory because Putnam lacked evidence supporting an essential part of her own claim.

What the Conduct Meant for Putnam

The direct consequences documented by the opinion are concrete. Putnam lost her job. She also became the defendant in a company lawsuit after forwarding work documents to her personal email and taking a jump drive when she left. CaramelCrisp alleged that the material included recipes and other trade secrets.

Putnam deleted the emailed documents after receiving the company’s demand, but CaramelCrisp later learned she still had the drive. The opinion doesn’t provide the outcome of that separate lawsuit or determine whether CaramelCrisp’s trade-secret allegations were proved.

Nor did Putnam establish in this case that her safety reports caused the employment actions she challenged. At the February 2025 trial, the jury found that her complaints to CaramelCrisp management weren’t a contributing factor in any adverse action. That is a finding about causation, not a finding that she never made the complaints or that the reported conditions were safe.

The jury decided that Putnam’s internal complaints didn’t contribute to the adverse actions. The appellate court separately decided that her anonymous FDA emails couldn’t support retaliation without evidence of employer knowledge.

The Trade-Secrets Lawsuit Wasn’t Tried as Retaliation

Putnam later argued that CaramelCrisp’s trade-secrets lawsuit was itself retaliatory. That theory never reached a jury.

Her retaliation complaint hadn’t identified the lawsuit as an adverse act. Earlier in the litigation, she had also opposed combining the two cases by describing them as “fundamentally distinct” disputes involving different laws and facts. When she sought to treat the company’s lawsuit as retaliation near trial, the district court concluded that she was trying to add a new factual basis too late.

The Seventh Circuit found no abuse of discretion in that decision. Its ruling didn’t determine whether CaramelCrisp filed the trade-secrets case with a retaliatory motive; it held that Putnam couldn’t add that theory at that stage of this case.

Why the Trial Challenges Were Dismissed

Putnam also challenged evidentiary exclusions, FDA witness subpoenas, jury instructions, the verdict form and the refusal to split the trial into separate phases. The appeals court didn’t decide whether those rulings were correct.

To obtain a new trial, Putnam needed to show that the disputed rulings prejudiced her. She provided some pretrial and trial excerpts but not complete transcripts showing all the testimony and evidence the jury heard. Without that record, the appellate judges said they couldn’t evaluate prejudice and dismissed those challenges.

The panel acknowledged that transcription costs can be prohibitive for individual litigants and that cost may have contributed to the incomplete record. It nevertheless declined to order supplementation because CaramelCrisp had identified the problem and Putnam hadn’t corrected it or explained how review could proceed without the transcripts.

What the Court Actually Decided

The Illinois common-law claim required Putnam to prove a more demanding causal connection than the federal claim. Under the FSMA, a protected report only has to play some role in an adverse decision. Illinois retaliatory-discharge law would have required proof that she was terminated because of the reports. Since the jury rejected causation under the lower federal threshold, the panel concluded that she couldn’t retry it under the higher state threshold.

Why the Ruling Matters Beyond This Case

The opinion places the FSMA alongside federal whistleblower laws covering industries where employee reporting can protect public welfare. Its new framework for the Seventh Circuit makes clear that a worker doesn’t need to prove retaliation was an employer’s primary motive. Any causal contribution can be enough.

Actual employer knowledge remains the gatekeeper. A decision-maker’s ability or opportunity to learn about a report isn’t sufficient by itself, and speculation can’t replace evidence. For anonymous whistleblowers, that creates a practical tension: withholding a name may reduce immediate exposure, but a later retaliation claim still depends on evidence that the employer connected the protected activity to the worker.

The broader public-health implications should not be overstated. The source shows that food-safety concerns were reported inside a food company and to the FDA. It does not establish that unsafe products reached the public, that customers were injured or that regulators confirmed Putnam’s allegations.

What Remains Unresolved

The appellate decision closes Putnam’s retaliation appeal, but several factual questions remain unanswered in the available record: whether the reported labeling, chocolate-repackaging and building conditions violated food law; what the FDA did after saying it was reviewing the complaint; who made the final termination decision; and how the separate trade-secrets lawsuit ended.

Most importantly, the ruling shouldn’t be read as a food-safety clearance for CaramelCrisp. The courts resolved whether Putnam proved retaliation in this lawsuit. They did not decide whether the conditions she reported were real.