This is especially obvious when you consider their other flavors. Imagine the alternative HN title "Law Firm Sues Kellogg for Not Enough S'Mores in S'Mores Pop-Tarts".
This is only because you have become accustomed to industrial food production practices. Because you've been tricked early in life and learned that 'strawberry' doesn't mean the berry and you've just normalized this practice.
If you ever do any cooking of your own you'll know that things like Strawberry Jam is made from taking a pot of strawberries and adding other ingredients. It very clearly is not taking 1 strawberry and adding a pot of strawberry like flavorings.
The real issue is we have crappy consumer protection laws. Companies should be forced to provide truthful advertising practices. E.g. 'Simulated Strawberry Flavor Poptarts' (don't hide the simulated label in tiny print that nobody notices until after the purchase). Another major problem is downsizing packaging, e.g. Orange Juice in a standard size container that is filled only to 90% capacity.
I could probably grab a box of pop tarts of whatever flavor I have in my pantry and check the ingredients list, but I'm pretty sure that it won't be misleading to any reasonable person.
And yes by analogy if I buy 'ground beef' I know it will be 100% ground beef because we have laws ensuring that is the case. However if I buy Shepards Pie & the packaging in large, bold text informs me that it is made with beef, I have to spend 60 seconds checking the packaging for small print that tells me the beef is actually 98% soy and 2% beef then I feel that's misleading.
As a consumer I don't know why one is protected while the other isn't, but I've learned through buying really bad products that I need to spend 60 seconds checking the packaging because some companies are fine hiding the truth.
So really the suit is about truth in advertising and exposing that we have a very low bar to be honest in consumer products.
I totally agree that "made with X!" adverts when X is actually 1% of the final product are misleading and should be illegal (maybe they are already, and it's just not enforced well?) - but I do think there's a difference between describing flavor and ingredients, and poptarts are pretty obviously the former.
How could a competitor benefit from using an honest quantity of real strawberries, if the only place they can effectively advertise that is in the tiny ingredients list that nobody reads?
"Filling made from 100% real strawberries!"
Already a common marketing construction, even. Apple juice is often sold with this bit of puffery.
Food labelling laws need an overhaul. And some serious teeth.
That statement says the strawberries are 100% real, it does nothing to exclude the addition of other ingredients or artificial red flavoring added elsewhere.
You may think I'm being asinine, but I'm not. I've been fooled by that language before.
"To me" being a native English speaker who has grown up in a culture where "strawberry" means a strawberry hasn't ever been within ten miles of that box of pop tarts? I mean, is that how far we've come? Just assume that what's literally printed on the box is a scam?
The frequency with which things without significant amounts of X but with some X-based or simulating flavor are labelled “X-flavored Y” rather than “X Y” suggests that it is not at all obvious or standard usage that the latter means the same as the former.
OTOH, mandatory food labelling laws are spotty on where they concretely prohibit the latter labelling.
On the gripping hand, the effect od the aggregate of those laws is important in shaping the context in which the package at issue is read.
It would be more akin to them advertising specific ingredients in S’Mores but the food stuffs not resembling S’mores in any form. It’s not as good an example as advertising strawberry but selling a predominately apple/pear artificially coloring it like strawberry. What’s the purpose of all this bait and switch? Allegedly so they can charge more than for apple/pear pop tarts.