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Key Takeaways

• A federal judge on Friday denied an attempt to pursue class treatment against Dollar Tree over lead-contaminated WanaBana Apple Cinnamon Fruit Purée pouches.
• The ruling does not mean the court determined the recalled pouches were safe. Instead, the judge concluded that differences among individual children's exposure, medical histories and alleged injuries made the proposed claims unsuitable for classwide treatment.
• The distinction is significant because federal regulators previously found extremely high concentrations of lead in WanaBana pouches and accused Dollar Tree of continuing to offer recalled products on store shelves after the recall began.

A major lawsuit involving Dollar Tree and children allegedly exposed to lead through recalled fruit pouches took an important turn Friday, but the legal victory for the discount retailer should not be confused with a finding that the food was safe.

U.S. District Judge Hector Gonzalez of the Eastern District of New York denied class certification in litigation involving WanaBana Apple Cinnamon Fruit Purée pouches sold by Dollar Tree.

The case is J.M.B. et al. v. Dollar Tree Stores, Inc., No. 1:25-cv-04663, filed in August 2025.

The plaintiffs include children, through their parents or guardians, who brought product-liability claims stemming from Dollar Tree's sale of the WanaBana pouches. The lawsuit asserted claims including negligence, strict products liability, breach of warranty, negligence per se and gross negligence.

Friday's decision adopted findings that the cases of individual children were simply too different to resolve together as one class.

The court did not determine that lead was absent from the pouches. Nor did the ruling erase the federal government's earlier findings concerning the product.

Instead, the problem for the plaintiffs was proving that thousands of potentially different circumstances could appropriately be decided through one lawsuit.

Children allegedly exposed to the product had different blood-lead levels, different medical histories and different claimed health outcomes. Determining whether a particular child's condition was caused by the pouches could therefore require an individualized examination of that child's exposure, genetics, environment, medical history and other possible sources of lead.

The magistrate judge who examined the class-certification issue also found problems with a proposed medical-monitoring class. Plaintiffs' own expert acknowledged that comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations would be needed on an individual basis before determining appropriate treatment or monitoring, according to an analysis of the recommendation.

In other words, the court's ruling is largely about how the claims can be litigated — not whether the underlying contamination occurred.

And that is where the case becomes particularly significant.

The FDA's own findings regarding WanaBana were unusually serious.

Beginning in October 2023, federal and state officials investigated elevated blood-lead levels in children and identified WanaBana Apple Cinnamon Fruit Purée pouches as a potential common source.

Laboratory testing subsequently detected what the FDA described as "extremely high concentrations of lead" in multiple lots, including samples collected from Dollar Tree stores. The agency said exposure at the levels detected could cause acute lead toxicity and warned that children were particularly susceptible.

WanaBana USA initiated a nationwide voluntary recall on October 29, 2023.

But the story did not end with the recall.

In a June 2024 warning letter, the FDA accused Dollar Tree of continuing to offer recalled pouches on store shelves even after the retailer had been notified about the recall.

The FDA said subsequent checks of Dollar Tree and combined Family Dollar/Dollar Tree locations showed recalled WanaBana products remained available and that regulators continued receiving reports of the products on shelves despite repeated communications with the company.

That history later produced another significant development.

In January 2026, the New York Attorney General announced an agreement requiring Dollar Tree to pay nearly $560,000 after an investigation concluded the company failed to promptly remove the recalled products from New York stores.

According to the Attorney General's office, hundreds of contaminated applesauce pouches were sold to consumers in New York after the nationwide recall began.

That makes Friday's ruling easy to misunderstand.

Dollar Tree prevailed on an enormously important procedural question: whether the plaintiffs could combine their claims and pursue the litigation as a class.

But defeating class certification is different from winning a trial over whether an individual child was injured.

For Dollar Tree, preventing class treatment potentially reduces the scale and leverage of the litigation because the retailer will not face the same unified proceeding involving a potentially large group of children and parents.

For affected families, however, the decision highlights a difficult reality of toxic-exposure litigation.

The very differences that can make a child's medical case unique — how much contaminated food was consumed, for how long, blood-lead measurements, developmental history and other environmental exposures — can also make it considerably harder to package thousands of cases into a single class action.

So Friday's ruling may represent a major victory for Dollar Tree.

It does not rewrite what regulators found inside the pouches.

And it does not amount to a judicial declaration that no child was harmed.