A three-judge panel at the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a class-action lawsuit against Biloxi, Mississippi, U.S.A.-based restaurant Mary Mahoney’s Old French House and seafood wholesaler Quality Poultry & Seafood (QPS) should be reinstated.
The case originated in 2024, when Alabama resident Todd McCain alleged that he purchased and ate what Mary Mahoney’s claimed was locally caught red snapper three times between 2013 and 2018, but it was actually foreign imported fish supplied by QPS. The complaint asked for damages to be paid to customers who unknowingly purchased foreign fish at Mary Mahoney’s between January 2012 and November 2019 up to USD 10,000 (EUR 8,904) each.
U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola dismissed the suit in June 2025, when he ruled that McCain’s claim did not constitute real injury and denied his motion to amend the complaint.
Now, however, the panel of judges said Guirola erred in dismissing the case, saying McCain’s claims of an economic injury suffered because he purchased inexpensive frozen fish he would not have purchased but for the defendants’ misrepresentation of their products as premium, local fish constitutes “injury sufficiently concrete to support Article III standing,” referring to a three-part constitutional requirement that a plaintiff must satisfy to bring a lawsuit in front of a U.S. federal court.
Although Guirola ruled that McCain could not prove he purchased substituted, imported fish on the dates he dined there, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals judges ruled that McCain was able to show that fish mislabeling at Mahoney’s was widespread and routine.
The defendants had “a continuous and ongoing unlawful agreement” to purchase inferior foreign frozen fish and sell them as “high-priced premium fresh fish,” the judges stated.
During the original criminal proceedings, Mahoney’s “admitted that between December 2013 and November 2019, it and its co-conspirators fraudulently sold approximately 58,750 pounds (over 29 tons)” of imported frozen fish as local species, the judges said.
For example, QPS substituted “all snapper” with imported tripletail in January 2018, and in September 2018, Mary Mahoney’s Co-Owner Anthony Cvitanovich “order[ed] imported frozen African perch, which Mary Mahoney’s regularly mislabeled and sold to customers as local Mississippi Gulf Coast snapper.”
The decision to reinstate the class-action lawsuit comes two years after both companies pled guilty in a related federal case to conspiring to mislabel imported seafood as locally caught.
