Food & Beverages: Regulatory & Litigation

About

Provided by Davis Wright Tremaine LLP

Our ability to nimbly handle both regulatory and litigation matters in the food industry is rare in the marketplace and gives us an advantage over many firms that strictly specialize in either food-related regulatory or litigation matters. We provide complete advisory and counseling services to food businesses, with both a regulatory compliance and risk mitigation perspective. We conduct due diligence activities related to major transactions in the food and beverage sector. We are often hired to provide due diligence review and subject matter expert comments on FDA, USDA, and food safety issues by other firms whose transactional teams do not have this expertise in-house.

As nationally recognized industry litigators, we defend many of the largest producers, brands, and retailers in the country in high-stakes class action claims, supply chain disputes, and brand protection matters. We combine our regulatory and litigation expertise to provide ongoing labelling advice to on issues related to FDA regulatory requirements (e.g., standards of identity, ingredient labelling, allergen labelling, characterizing flavors); nutrient-content, structure/function, and disease claims; organic claims; natural claims; “healthy” claims; country of origin and “Made in the USA” claims; and slack fill issues, among others. We routinely defeat claims against our clients where other firms, facing similar or identical claims, do not prevail.