Photo illustration by Christian Testanier.

An Irvine man is suing Wild Planet, the Greenpeace-approved McKinleyville seafood company, claiming its tuna cans don’t hold quite as much tuna as advertised. The labels on each can say there’s five ounces inside, but plaintiff Heney Shihad claims there’s not quite that much, and he’d like to be compensated.

Shihad filed a class action suit March 25 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Eureka Division, alleging fraud, negligent misrepresentation, and violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law, according to Legal Newsline. 

Is Shihad an innocent victim of false advertising? Well, maybe. But there’s reason to be skeptical.

For one thing, he filed a nearly identical lawsuit back in January against Safeway. According to a story in the L.A. Times, Shihad’s lawyers in that case say he’d been regularly buying five-ounce cans of Safeway brand tuna since 2013 and, “at some point,” noticed that they were “substantially underweight.” So he filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of more than 1 million unsuspecting tuna consumers across country, claiming they were owed more than $5 million in damages. That’s a lot of tuna.

But wait! There’s more!

A quick Google search reveals that another man, Ehder Soto of Santa Cruz County, beat Shihad to the punch. Soto filed a class action suit against Wild Planet late last year, claiming the cans are under-filled. 

From Legal Newsline:

Soto claims that independent testing by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “determined that, over a sample of 24 cans, 5-ounce cans of Sustainable Seas Solid Albacore Tuna in Water contain an average of only 2.25 ounces of pressed cake tuna when measured precisely,” the complaint states. He argues that this is 30.3 percent below the federally mandated minimum standard of fill of 3.23 ounces for these cans.

Like Shihad, Soto filed a nearly identical lawsuit against Safeway. In that suit (pdf here), Soto claims he’d been buying five cans of Safeway tuna every two weeks for two years based on their label. (Makes you wonder when he found time to buy Wild Planet tuna.) He’s seeking $5 million in damages on behalf of anyone who bought five-ounce cans of Safeway Chunk Light Tuna in Water and Safeway Solid White Albacore Tuna in Water.

So what’s the deal? Are tuna companies systematically short-changing (short-tuna-ing?) their customers? That’s debatable, but what’s clear is that suing tuna companies has turned into something of a cottage industry. Seafood industry website Undercurrent News reports that the three largest tuna-canning brands in the country are petitioning the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to change the measuring standard in response to a string of lawsuits. 

The report quotes an anonymous industry source as saying the current standard — measuring the “pressed cake” of tuna inside a can — is “highly inaccurate and does not provide meaningful consumer info.”

The Outpost reached out to Wild Planet President Bill Carvalho earlier today but didn’t immediately hear back.