The Whole Foods Label Says The Meat Is Free Of Antibiotics, But A Lawsuit Claims That’s Not Always True

A class-action lawsuit claims some of the meat sold by Whole Foods, the pioneer of natural food, contains antibiotics even though the 300-store chain tells shoppers it doesn’t.

The allegations stem from meat sold in Whole Foods locations in Southern California, which advocacy nonprofit Farm Forward tested for antibiotics and other adulterants. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, aims to reverse the trend of undisclosed use of antibiotics in the no-antibiotics-ever meat industry, and curb the spread of antibiotic resistance, which is driven by overuse of antibiotics in industrial meat production.

“The antibiotic-free claims are not being verified. These are claims being made with more or less a ‘trust us,’” says Andrew DeCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward, which filed the class action lawsuit on behalf of consumer plaintiffs. “We want the meat industry to stop humane-washing. Meet the expectations the public has about how animals should be raised for food, which includes that they don’t routinely use antibiotics to compensate for bad husbandry and dirty, dangerous conditions.”

Whole Foods did not respond to a request for comment.

The overuse of antibiotics can increase resistance, which is a threat to human health. As many as 10 million people are expected to die annually from causes related to antibiotic resistance by 2050, as a warming planet makes the problem worse.

There’s also a financial incentive to sell antibiotic-free meat. All links in the supply chain, from ranchers to retailers, charge a premium for it, and in stores it often sells for $1 more per pound than conventional meat.

Earlier this year, a peer-reviewed article published in Science called out the meat industry for passing off animals raised with antibiotics as antibiotic-free.

Co-authored by researchers from George Washington University and Kevin Lo, the CEO of testing startup FoodID, the study sampled cattle from 12% of the supply of beef raised without antibiotics over a seven-month period—a total of more than 38,000 cattle total.

FoodID tested samples from 699 cattle, or two cattle from each lot in the study. The results suggest many labels are misleading. More than 40% of the feedyards sampled—and about 15% of the total lots tested across all feedyards—had at least one case of an animal testing positive for antibiotics. The study also found that more than a quarter of the cattle sampled from the Global Animal Partnership welfare certification program, used by Whole Foods and hundreds of other retailers and meat purchasers, had at least one positive test. Whole Foods denied at the time that it has sold meat raised with antibiotics when the label claims none.

Consumers are “paying more to support a system which is absolutely the opposite of what they’re trying to support,” says Gretchen Elsner, one of the lawyers bringing the suit. “They’re going into Whole Foods saying, ‘I am anti-factory-farming and I’ll pay more for this higher-quality meat.’ But they’re just giving more money to the industry.”