Cold Stone Creamery sued over ‘pistachio’ ice-cream with no pistachios

The suit named other alleged deceptive ice-cream flavors, including mango, coconut, mint, orange, orange sorbet and butter pecan. Photograph: Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Kahala Brands

Imagine you are at the ice-cream shop, an array of colorful flavors lie before you in a glass case. A flavor calls to you, its label reads “pistachio”.

After your purchase, you look online at the ice-cream shop’s website. Turns out, the pistachio ice-cream had no pistachios in it. Instead, it had “pistachio flavoring”, made up of “water, ethanol, propylene, glycol, natural & artificial flavor, yellow 5 [and] blue 1”.