The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California granted a motion to strike class allegations against PepsiCo, Inc. and its snack food subsidiary, Frito-Lay North America, Inc. in a putative class action brought by independent convenience store owners for alleged price discrimination under the Robinson-Patman Act. Alqosh Enters., Inc. v. PepsiCo, Inc., 2026 WL 478119 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 18, 2026).
The plaintiffs alleged that PepsiCo charged independent convenience stores higher prices for snack products than it charged chain grocery stores and that it offered promotional payments to the chains that were not offered to independent stores. Consistent with precedent uniformly rejecting attempts to bring Robinson-Patman Act claims as class actions, the court found that these claims required proof as to individual transactions and that the commonality requirements in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 could not be met. Accordingly, the court struck the class allegations.
The price discrimination claims that the plaintiffs asserted required a showing that (1) the challenged sales were made in interstate commerce; (2) each pair of sales was contemporaneous and of like grade and quality; (3) the seller discriminated in price between the disfavored and favored buyer; and (4) the effect of such discrimination was to injure, destroy, or prevent competition to the advantage of a favored purchaser. The court held that determining whether each set of purchases satisfied the “in commerce” element required individualized proof and was “not a common question capable of resolution on a class-wide basis because the question must be answered as to each of the several thousand or hundred thousand pairs of purportedly discriminatory transactions at issue here.” Second, the court held that even if each sale was made to a class member within, at most, one month of a sale to a chain competitor, that did not resolve the contemporaneousness inquiry. Third, whether different prices were offered to the disfavored and favored buyer “involves an individualized determination” precluding class certification. Fourth, proof of competitive injury depended on store-specific pricing decisions. As such, the court concluded that the price discrimination claims did not involve sufficient commonality and were not susceptible to resolution on a class-wide basis.
The court found that plaintiffs’ promotional payment claims were likewise inconsistent with class-wide resolution because they required individualized analysis. As a result, the court granted PepsiCo’s motion to strike all the class allegations. While expressing skepticism as to whether the plaintiffs could remedy the pervasive deficiencies identified in the opinion, the court did not bar plaintiffs from amending the class allegations.
[View source.]
