McRib lawsuit survives McDonald's dismissal attempt
Judge rules expecting rib meat is neither unreasonable nor fanciful, consumer-deception claims proceed in the courtroom tradition of Liebeck's coffee and a burned McNugget
Images
An image of the McDonald's McRib sandwich, published on the McDonald's website.
newsweek.com
Person's hand holding a container of McDonald's chicken nuggets, Lafayette, California, May 5, 2026.
newsweek.com
Close-up of container of McDonald's french fries, Lafayette, California, February 5, 2026.
newsweek.com
McDonald's must face a class action claiming that the McRib's name, appearance and marketing mislead customers into believing the sandwich contains pork rib meat, after a federal judge rejected the company's attempt to dismiss the case. U.S. District Judge April Perry ruled on October 30 that it was too early to accept the argument that no reasonable consumer would believe the McRib contains rib meat, writing that the plaintiffs' understanding of "McRib" is "not unreasonable or fanciful." Four customers filed the suit in December 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
The complaint alleges that the patty is deliberately ridged to resemble a rack of pork ribs while containing no rib meat at all — only, according to the plaintiffs, less expensive pork products including shoulder, heart, tripe and scalded stomach. McDonald's denies that the McRib contains heart, tripe or stomach, points to a published ingredient list of pork, water, salt, dextrose and rosemary extract, describes the patty on its website as "seasoned boneless pork," and calls the lawsuit a distortion of the facts and the claims meritless. The company argues that some customers' preference for a particular cut of pork does not turn its marketing into consumer fraud. Perry dismissed some claims but allowed consumer-deception, fraud and unjust-enrichment claims to proceed. No liability has been found; the plaintiffs must still produce their evidence.
McDonald's has met this kind of question in court before. Whether its coffee was too hot was settled by a jury: Stella Liebeck, 79, suffered third-degree burns requiring hospitalization and skin grafts after a cup spilled in her parked car in Albuquerque in 1992, and in 1994 jurors found the company liable, assigned her 20 percent of the responsibility and awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages. Whether a Chicken McNugget could foreseeably burn a child was settled the same way: after Philana Holmes bought her four-year-old daughter a six-piece Happy Meal at a drive-thru in Tamarac, Florida, in 2019 and a nugget became trapped against the girl's thigh, jurors found the franchisee, Upchurch Foods, negligent for failing to warn of foreseeable risks — while declining to find McDonald's USA negligent — and a separate jury awarded $800,000, divided equally between four years of past damages and future damages. The family had initially sought $15 million. In each dispute, what a seller owed the person who bought its product was measured by a jury, in dollars.
The McRib plaintiffs must still prove that customers paid a premium for meat they did not receive. What "rib" reasonably conveyed is now a question for a jury in Illinois.