The labeling on Bethenny Frankel’s Skinnygirl Margaritas is light on facts – its claimed use of “100 percent blue agave tequila” as a key ingredient is completely bogus, a bombshell lawsuit says.
Skinnygirl drinkers Christopher Rapcinsky and Erin Baker take aim at the tequila claim in an amended version of their $10 million class action lawsuit against the makers of the ready-mixed cocktail for having falsely claimed the drink was “all natural” with “no preservatives.”
They found out that wasn’t the case earlier this year, when Whole Foods yanked the product off its shelves after discovering it contained the potentially carcinogenic – but common – not-so-natural preservative sodium benzoate.
Skinnygirl founder and former “Real Housewives of New York City” star Frankel has repeatedly claimed that her “margarita you can trust” only had two ingredients: agave nectar and 100 percent blue agave tequila.
In their Manhattan federal court suit, Rapcinsky and Baker says the tequila that’s actually used in the drink appears to be “a lower quality and purity tequila by-product called mixto – essentially a mash of tequila and some unknown additives (rarely organic) which may comprise as much as 49 percent of the final mixed liquor.”
The concerned consumers’ lawyer, Tom Mullaney, said “100 percent blue agave is not stuff people mix.”
Comparing the highly regulated pure tequila to mixto “is like comparing Thunderbird wine to a fine Chianti. They’re both wine, but very different,” Mullaney said.
The suit notes that at some point after liquor giant Beam Global bought the Skinnygirl brand from Frankel, the label on the bottle changed to say the drink was made “with premium Blue Agave tequila,” removing the “100 percent” reference.
That way the statement could technically be true “if even some miniscule trace quantity of the mixto was actually blue agave tequila” – but it’s still highly misleading, the suit said.
Skinnygirl’s “entire marketing campaign, both its advertising and labeling, is based on falsehoods,” the suit says.
And depending on what’s in the mixto, the drink might be even less natural than was previously revealed, Mullaney.
“Only time and pretrial discovery will tell what was really in the ‘tequila’ that went into the phony ‘all-natural’ margarita. What is certain is the fact that consumers would not have purchased Skinnygirl Margarita had they known it was manufactured with inferior mixto tequila,” the suit says.
In a statement, Beam Global called the suit “frivolous.” “Skinnygirl Margarita is made with premium blue agave tequila and meets the highest quality standards. We will defend our case vigorously, and we are fully confident we will prevail,” the company said.
Mullaney feels differently. “The weakened tequila strengthens our case,” he said.
Frankel is not named as a defendant in the suit because she no longer owns the line, but she fiercely defended the drink earlier this year when it was revealed it was not as all natural as she’d claimed.
“[E]veryone loves to try to tear down a success. This is a non-event,” she snipped. Her reps declined comment.