I can't find an example of an individual store being liable for unknowingly selling a preprepared item that causes illness, though my search has hardly been thorough. Plenty of examples where they're selling in-house prepared deli items, but that'd be the equivalent of the dealer adding filler themselves.
And I've never heard of a seller being targeted for smoking related lawsuits.
I asked chatGPT for a “ example of an individual store being liable for unknowingly selling a preprepared item that causes illness” and it gave me a non hallucinated one
Imo because it's a waste of thread space but here you go.
One example of a grocery store being held liable for unknowingly selling a pre-prepared item that caused illness is the case of In Re: King Soopers Listeria Outbreak Litigation. In this case, a number of people became ill with listeriosis, a serious and potentially life-threatening bacterial infection, after consuming pre-packaged deli meats sold at various King Soopers grocery store locations in Colorado.
The outbreak was traced back to contaminated meat produced by a third-party supplier, and a number of people filed lawsuits against King Soopers alleging that the store was liable for selling the contaminated meat. The lawsuits alleged that King Soopers had a duty to ensure that the food it sold was safe for consumption and that it had breached that duty by selling the contaminated meat.
The case ultimately settled for an undisclosed sum, with King Soopers agreeing to compensate those who became ill as a result of consuming the contaminated meat.
This case illustrates how grocery stores can be held liable for selling pre-prepared food items that cause illness, even if the store was unaware of the contamination at the time of sale. It also highlights the importance of ensuring that food safety measures are in place throughout the supply chain, from the producers of the food to the stores that sell it to the public.
This seems to be an invented combination of several real events. King Sooper was sued for selling prepared cantaloupe with listeria, and there was an event where deli meat and cheese sold elsewhere was contaminated with listeria, but I can't find anything like what is described.
