Baxendale was a 25-year-old professional dancer with a severe nut allergy who passed away in January after allegedly eating mislabeled Florentine cookies. Órla Baxendale’s estate filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the grocery store that sold the cookies.
The estate’s lawyers claim that Baxendale passed away “due to the egregious negligence and reckless indifference to the rights of others and an intentional and wanton violation of those rights by” the grocery store Stew Leonard’s and the company that makes the cookies, Cookies United, in a lawsuit filed on May 23 and examined by PEOPLE. The manufacturer and the supermarket are named as defendants. The case was brought before the Waterbury, Connecticut, Superior Court.
The lawsuit states that Baxendale consumed the Florentine Cookies on January 11. In a statement issued on January 24, her family’s attorneys reiterated the allegations in the complaint and stated that she passed away that day from anaphylactic shock. In January, representatives from the Connecticut Department of Public Health (DPH) and the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection (DCP) declared that they were looking into the incident.
Bexendale carried an EpiPen, but her allergy was too severe, according to a statement released in January by the family’s attorneys. Attorney Marijo C. Adime stated at the time that “an EpiPen was used after she began to have an anaphylactic reaction, but due to the severity of her allergy, it was not effective.”
According to the lawsuit, the dancer “like all consumers, relied upon the manufacturer and seller to properly label the package sold to the general public.”
“Grossly negligent, intentional, reckless, callous, indifferent to human life, and a wanton violation as the manufacturer and seller were required by law to properly declare the ingredients,” the lawsuit claims, referring to the improper labeling of the cookies.
According to an alert from the Connecticut State Department of Consumer Protection dated January 23, Stew Leonard’s recalled the chocolate and vanilla versions of the Cookies United-made Florentine Cookies because of a labeling error. The supermarket admitted that one person may have died as a result of the error. The supermarket alerted customers on January 25 that the cookies included peanuts and unreported eggs.
“Stew Leonard’s is working with the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection and the supplier to determine the cause of the labeling error,” the statement issued on January 25 stated. “Customers who have purchased these cookies should bring back the product to Stew Leonard’s customer service for a full refund.”
In a video statement following Baxendale’s passing, CEO Stew Leonard Jr. expressed his sympathies to her family. In the video, Leonard Jr. stated, “Our chief safety officer at Stew Leonard’s was never notified and the supplier changed the recipe and started going from soy nuts to peanuts.”
The misprinted label “was created by, and applied to, their product by Stew Leonard’s,” according to a press release issued by Cookies United on January 23. The company also included documents purporting to show that it informed Stew Leonard’s staff members about the recipe change in July 2023.
The lawsuit states that “no fewer than eleven employees of the Stew Leonard’s Defendants were notified by email of the change in ingredients, including the addition of peanuts to the cookie recipe, by the defendant cookie manufacturer, Cookies United LLC, on July 20, 2023, approximately six months prior to this tragic death.”
The lawsuit claims that the supermarket chain’s system to “maintain and update the proper labels was broken, unreliable, inherently dangerous, undependable, untrustworthy, erratic, and deplorable.” Stew Leonard’s allegedly “ignored” the email, “never changed the label or the nutrition fact panel, and never properly updated the packaging.”
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