How much money will McDonald’s have to pay in the hot chicken McNugget lawsuit?
McDonald’s is on the hook after serving chicken nuggets that a court deemed excessively hot. How much might the company have to pay?
A family in South Florida sued Mcdonald’s and the Upchurch Foods franchise after their four-year received second-degree burns from chicken nuggets served in her happy meal. The jury decided that the company would have to pay damages to the family for failing to warn customers that the temperature of the food was dangerous. However, the decision was split, meaning that McDonald’s was not found to be negligent.
The fast-food giant responded to the verdict by voicing their frustration saying, “This was an unfortunate incident, but we respectfully disagree with the verdict. Our customers should continue to rely on McDonald’s to follow policies and procedures for serving Chicken McNuggets safely.”
Later this summer, there will be another set of court proceedings to determine how much money the Holmes family will receive from McDonald’s.
A look back at past McDonald’s lawsuits
One of the most famous lawsuits brought against a fast food company for the dangers posed by their products was brought in the early 1990s by Stella Liebeck.
Seventy-nine years old at the time, Liebeck, was severely burned by a coffee she purchased at a McDonald’s in New Mexico. A jury of twelve awarded Liebeck $160,000 in compensatory damages. Regarding punitive damages, McDonald’s was required to pay $2.7 million. However, the judge in the case reduced the level of punitive damages to $480,000, and in the end, the case was appealed by both sides. The parties settled their financial agreement outside of the court, and the final amount paid was never made public. More recently, the New York Times took a look at the way the media covered the case, which in many instances, painted the multibillion-dollar corporation as the victim of an unjustified lawsuit.
There is a pending case in Palm Beach from May 2020 where a man named Alexei Stolfat bit into a chicken nugget and encountered a hard foreign object. Feeling severe pain, the man went to be examined by a dentist who said that biting into a bone found in the nugget had left micro-cracks in the tooth. With this evidence, the customer sued McDonald’s for $1.1 million. According to Yahoo! News, Mcdonald’s is still evaluating Stolfat’s case.