It’s been well over a year since the Oregon Supreme Court heard oral arguments about whether a lawsuit against the Tillamook County Creamery Association should be allowed to proceed. On Thursday, the court agreed that a group of Oregon residents suing the creamery does have a claim, allowing the case to move forward.

Tillamook, founded in 1909 as a farmer-owned dairy cooperative and known for its varieties of artisan cheese, ice cream and yogurt, is accused of misleading marketing. The creamery has denied the allegations and has said it’s transparent about its practices.

The California-based Animal Legal Defense Fund, along with Portland-based law firm Sugarman Dahab, filed the case on behalf of a group of Oregon residents in 2019.

The suit alleges Tillamook violated Oregon’s consumer protection laws for advertising campaigns that allowed it to sell its cheese, butter and other dairy products at a premium.

It claims the creamery’s marketing led consumers to believe its milk is sourced from small, family-owned, lush-green pasture-based dairies in Tillamook County, when in reality, the case alleges, it sources two-thirds of its milk from one of the country’s largest dairies with over 28,000 cows east of the Cascades near Boardman.

The large dairy in question, Columbia River Dairy, is managed by Threemile Canyon Farm – which also operates a beef operation and farms corn, onion, potatoes and a variety of other crops on 93,000 acres of land.

Threemile is not named in the Tillamook case, although it is one of the defendants in a separate case alleging the farm contributed to a decades-long nitrate pollution crisis in the Lower Umatilla Basin.

This state Supreme Court decision, however, is not about whether Tillamook violated Oregon consumer protection laws, or more specifically, the Unlawful Trade Practices Act, said Nadia Dahab, an attorney representing the plaintiffs against Tillamook.

Tillamook did not respond to OPB’s request for comment by the time this story was published.

When the lawsuit was originally filed in a trial court, Tillamook had argued the people suing didn’t have a case and couldn’t show they were misled. That court agreed, and the Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed that decision in 2022.

“The trial court and the court of appeals had previously ruled that the case couldn’t go forward because in those courts’ view the consumer protection law did not provide an avenue for relief,” Dahab said. “But the Supreme Court has now reversed both of those courts’ decisions, saying that the case can in fact go forward as plaintiffs have pleaded it.”

Now that the Oregon Supreme Court has reversed the lower courts’ decisions, the plaintiffs can go back to the trial court to try to prove their allegations against Tillamook and seek to get the case certified as a class-action, said Dahab, who calls this decision a big win for consumers.

“Cases like this allow consumers to hold businesses accountable to holding up their end of the deal,” she said. “And making sure that businesses are holding their product out as something that it actually is, and not taking advantage of a less informed, less powerful individual consumer.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/04/03/oregon-supreme-court-tillamook-lawsuit-case-moves-forward/