A Queens man who thought he won his own yogurt franchise on a Food Network reality show claims in a new lawsuit that he got stiffed on the jackpot.
Kris Herrera, 34, of Corona said he signed off on letting the episode of “Giving You the Business” run only because he thought he would be getting his own outlet of the yogurt chain 16 Handles.
Instead, he got a mere single share of the franchise’s parent company, Yogurt City Inc., his suit against Food Network and Yogurt City says.
“I feel like it’s a total fraud. They lied to me and they are lying to the American public. Every week, dozens of people come into the store and congratulate me on winning my own franchise. They don’t know all I got was the shaft,” said Herrera, who works as a manager at a 16 Handles in the West Village.
Oscar Michelen, one of Herrera’s lawyers, said, This harkens back to the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s, when TV producers thought they could do whatever they wanted with their game shows, even if it meant lying to the contestants and their viewers.”
On the show, CEOs pick four top employees who are assigned to straighten out a supposedly troubled franchise, where they are confronted by actors posing as quarrelsome customers.
The employees are “secretly put to the test in a series of outrageous challenges designed to gauge their skills . . . The strongest candidate will walk away with the keys to their very own franchise worth up to half a million dollars,” the network’s Web site says.
In April, Herrera and the other contestants were sent to work a shift at a 16 Handles in Kips Bay.
The married father of two didn’t find out he’d been recorded for the show until the next day, but agreed to sign papers allowing the episode to run.
When the show aired May 23, Herrera was declared the winner — but quickly learned his dream of owning his own business was just a fantasy.
“Despite being repeatedly told that he had won the valuable and lucrative franchise store in front of countless witnesses and during a recorded episode . . . on national television, he was subsequently told he would not be given a franchise at all,” Michelen and Herrera’s other lawyer, Ivan J. Parron, said in a statement.
The suit, filed Tuesday in Queens Supreme Court, seeks unspecified monetary damages.
A Food Network rep said, “We don’t comment on pending litigation and we haven’t received the paperwork yet.”
Additional reporting by Matthew Abrahams