MANHATTAN (LN) — A federal judge on Thursday denied all ten appeals from claimants in the Daily Harvest Crumbles Settlement, ruling that the settlement administrator's award determinations were entitled to near-arbitration-level deference and that the fund's inability to fully compensate every serious injury was, in the court's view, an unavoidable feature of distributing limited money equitably.
U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York upheld the decisions of administrator Edgar C. Gentle III, who oversaw distribution of the roughly $23 million settlement between plaintiffs and Daily Harvest, Inc. and Second Bite Foods, Inc., doing business as Stone Gate Foods — two of the defendants accused of causing injuries through French Lentil + Leek Crumbles contaminated with tara flour.
The ten appeals fell into three groups. Six claimants — each represented law firm — had received Category 3 hospitalization awards but never checked the box on their claim forms requesting enhancement consideration. Cote held they had forfeited that opportunity. Without a request on the claim form for an enhancement, she wrote, the administrator was under no obligation to review those records for that purpose.
Three other claimants challenged the Enhancement Matrix itself. One, identified as AA, argued she had been told by the administrator during an August 2024 call — arranged by her attorney — that she could expect $75,000 and potentially two to three times that amount. Cote declined to treat that conversation as binding, noting that the publicly available settlement notice had warned claimants that Category 3 awards of $30,000 may proportionally increase or decrease depending upon the response from class members. AA received $30,000 for her Category 3 claim.
A second claimant, JC, who suffered a pregnancy loss she attributed to the product, received a Category 2 award of $15,000 and an enhancement of roughly $21,400. She sought at least $0.10 million and argued that a subjective damages evaluation was preferable to the matrix. Cote disagreed, noting that the matrix assigned a miscarriage the largest number of points of any factor in JC's award and that, as Cote wrote, principles of equity did not allow the administrator and do not allow this Court to enhance an individual's award based on a subjective evaluation of the injury.
A third claimant, DT, who received $0.13 million under Category 4 for a cholecystectomy and an initial enhancement of roughly $13,200 under Category 5, was awarded an additional 11 enhancement points on appeal to the administrator. She sought an additional $0.20 million based on ongoing medical expenses and diminished physical capacity. Cote again deferred to the administrator's use of objective criteria and a September 2, 2024 cutoff date for compensable injuries, noting that no claimant had objected to that cutoff when the administrator's October 31, 2025 report was posted and a November 11 deadline for objections passed without any filed.
The tenth claimant, VA, filed his claim 247 days after the deadline, explaining that medical incapacity had prevented timely filing and that he had consumed the product at a party and had no proof of purchase. The source record indicates VA was treated in an emergency room rather than admitted to a hospital. Cote held the claim too late, noting that a three-month grace period had already been extended to late filers and that VA's claim arrived five months after even that extended deadline.
Cote grounded her analysis in Second Circuit precedent treating settlement administrator decisions with deference analogous to arbitration awards, requiring only a barely colorable justification for the outcome reached to confirm a determination.
At the close of the Category 1 through 4 review, 1,183 claimants had been awarded a combined $17 million, leaving the balance of the $23 million fund for enhancements — with final monetary values for enhancement points still to be calculated once the holdback funds are disbursed and the appeals are resolved.