> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Joke Has No Jurisdiction - URL: https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/no-jurisdiction/ - Published: 2026-09-21T15:13:39.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-21T15:13:43.000Z - Description: Liquid Death got sued on August 24 over two words on the front of a can. The teardown graded the brand straight A's and named the wrong risk. Your voice and your claims live in two different jurisdictions. - Author: giovanni gallucci - Tags: Label Claims, Clean Label, Ingredients, Crisis Response, Brand Positioning, Organic Social, shelf-life *Listen to this episode of Shelf-Life, then use the piece below.* Go pull up the product page for [Liquid Death's energy variety pack](https://liquiddeath.com/products/sparkling-energy-vp1?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) and read the bullet list. Not the can. The bullets. "Unextreme Caffeine (100mg) = 1 Coffee." "Zero Sugar | 5 Calories." "Boosts Metabolism." "Essential Vitamins + L-Theanine." "Co-Formulated by Board-Certified Surgeon Dr. Darshan Shah, MD." Not one of those is a joke. The skull is on the can. The bullets read like a supplement bottle, written straight, by somebody who was not trying to be funny. That's the part of [Liquid Death](https://www.linkedin.com/company/liquid-death/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) nobody studies, and on August 24 it went to federal court. ## What happened A plaintiff named James Williamson sued Supplying Demand, Inc., the company that sells Liquid Death, in the Northern District of California. The stamp across the top of page one reads Case 4:26-cv-08839, Document 1, Filed 08/24/26, and it runs 45 pages. The claim under attack is "0g Sugar" and "Zero Sugar" on the Sparkling Energy line. The reason is allulose. The mechanism is worth having straight, because it is coming for a lot of cans. FDA regulations define total sugars as all free mono- and disaccharides. Allulose is a monosaccharide. Under [21 C.F.R. 101.60(c)(1)](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-101/subpart-D/section-101.60?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), a "sugar free" or "zero sugar" claim generally needs less than half a gram of sugar per reference amount and per labeled serving. Then in 2020 FDA published [nonbinding guidance](https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-industry-declaration-allulose-and-calories-allulose-nutrition-and-supplement-facts-labels?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) saying it would exercise enforcement discretion and let manufacturers leave allulose out of the Total Sugars and Added Sugars lines in the Nutrition Facts panel. That guidance did not amend the definition of sugar. It did not touch the regulation that governs front-of-package claims. So you can end up with two documents on one can that disagree with each other, and the agency is fine with it. In the panel on the back, allulose comes out. On the front, it still counts. On July 27 the Seventh Circuit made that gap load-bearing. In *Franco v. Chobani, LLC*, 184 F.4th 599, the court asked FDA for its own read, and FDA said the regulation unambiguously includes all monosaccharides, allulose among them, and that the 2020 guidance announced a decision not to enforce rather than a change to the rule. The court agreed, reversed a dismissal on preemption grounds, and held that FDA declining to enforce does not shield a manufacturer from a state consumer protection claim about the same label. Four weeks after that, the filings started. Liquid Death on August 24\. WK Kellogg the same day, over "Zero Added Sugar" on Special K. KIND on August 28, over "ZEROg Added Sugar" on four bar varieties. Three companies, three districts, five days. Morrison Foerster wrote the whole pattern up for its food and agriculture clients on [September 1](https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/260901-allulose-claims-face-growing-class-action-scrutiny?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), which tells you how the defense bar is reading it. [BevNET's Brad Avery](https://www.bevnet.com/news/2026/liquid-death-david-protein-facing-lawsuits-claiming-allulose-contradicts-zero-sugar-claims?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) had the beverage half of it on August 26. ## The risk this morning's show named is the wrong one Today's Shelf-Life put Liquid Death on the table and graded it five ways: hook, format fit, cadence, community mechanic, retail-to-social loop. Four A's and an A minus, which is about right. Then the show named the one thing worth worrying about as the voice going corporate. Protect the joke from the growth. That's the wrong risk, and the episode hands over the evidence three sections before it gets there without noticing what it's holding. Section 3 praises the category march as the engine of the whole feed. Still water, then sparkling, then flavored sparkling, then iced tea, then electrolyte powders, and this year an energy drink. Every step is a new reason to post and a fresh headline. That read is correct and it is half the picture. Every step on that march is also a new regulated surface. Canned water is close to claim-proof. There is almost nothing on the front of that can a plaintiff's lawyer can put a ruler against. An energy drink has a sweetener, a caffeine load, a vitamin panel, a metabolism claim, and a nutrient content claim with a number attached to it. The cadence the show grades an A is the same machine that built the exposure. Nobody over there did anything dumb. They kept walking into rooms with more rules in them, on purpose, because that's what growth looks like. The joke scales. The claim doesn't. ## The claim is still up, and that is a decision I pulled the product page this morning, twenty-eight days after the complaint was filed. "Zero Sugar | 5 Calories" is still sitting in the bullets. So is the sentence in the page description, verbatim: "With just 5 calories, unextreme caffeine (100mg), zero sugar, and a clean refreshing taste." That's not a gotcha. It may well be the right call. *Franco* binds federal courts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin and nowhere else. The California case is brand new and untested, the defendants have not filed a response, and other courts can land somewhere different on preemption. Leaving the claim up while your lawyers work is a defensible position and a lot of good companies would take it. But it is a position, arrived at on purpose. That's the part most brands reading this have skipped. You have a sweetener in a can and a line on a website and nobody has ever put the two of them in the same room on the same afternoon. And look at what else is in that bullet list, sitting right next to the line being sued over. "Boosts Metabolism" is a structure/function claim. "Co-Formulated by Board-Certified Surgeon Dr. Darshan Shah, MD" is a credential doing work. The funniest brand in the beverage aisle wrote copy that reads like the back of a vitamin bottle, because the second you make a claim the costume comes off whether you meant to take it off or not. One more small thing, and it is the tell. The claim bullets ship inside the page source. The ingredient panel does not render there at all. Whatever the reason, the effect is that the fastest thing to read on that page is the part with the legal exposure. ## Two jurisdictions, one approval process Here's the transferable part, and it has nothing to do with whether your brand is funny. Your voice and your claims live in two different jurisdictions. A caption gets judged on whether it lands. A front panel gets judged on a number against a threshold, by somebody who has never heard of you and does not care that the can is a bit. Tone is the entire product in one of those places and completely irrelevant in the other. Almost nobody routes them through two different reviews. On most teams I've worked with, the person writing the Amazon bullets is the person writing the Reels caption, on the same Tuesday, in the same tab, in the same headspace. That works fine right up until a sentence crosses from one jurisdiction into the other, and nothing about the sentence tells you when it did. Which, for the record, is why the valuation everybody quotes for this company is also two and a half years old. The $1.4 billion number is a March 2024 round. [Forge's indicative secondary price](https://forgeglobal.com/insights/liquid-death-upcoming-ipo-news/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) had it at $8.57 a share, around $932 million, as of June 11, 2026\. Nobody updated the sentence, because nobody owns the sentence. Same disease, lower stakes. ## What to do with this before Friday The news here is a negative, so all three of these are mitigate and respond. None of them require a lawyer to start, and all three are better done now than after somebody asks. **1\. The post, and you can paste this one.** Write your own version and pin it before the question shows up in your comments. > Somebody asked what sweetens this, so here it is. We use \[ingredient\], it sits \[position\] on the ingredient list, and there's \[X\] grams of it in a can. On the front we say \[exact words on your front panel\]. If you want the whole panel it's on the back of every can and on the product page, no scrolling required. Ask us anything else about what's in it and we'll answer it here, not in a DM. Three rules. Use the ingredient's real name, not the category. Put a number in it. Do not explain the regulation, because the second you start teaching people about enforcement discretion you have lost the room and look like you are building a defense. **2\. The still.** One frame, shot from directly overhead on a plain surface: your can lying on its front so the claim faces the camera, and a second can beside it turned so the ingredient list and the Nutrition Facts panel face the camera. Both must be readable at a pinch-zoom on a phone. No hands, no props, no branded backdrop, no styling. Natural window light, and if the label has a scuff leave the scuff in. A staged one reads as a press release. The whole point of this picture is that you are not hiding the back of the can, and a picture that looks art-directed undercuts the only thing it's for. **3\. The video, 20 seconds, five shots, shoot it on a phone today.** Shot 1, 3 seconds, hands only, close: the can lands on the counter, front label up. No talking yet. Shot 2, 4 seconds, same framing: a thumb turns the can, the camera holds on the ingredient list. Voice starts here, not before. Shot 3, 5 seconds, medium, your actual person in your actual kitchen or plant floor: they name the sweetener and the number out loud, once, plainly. Shot 4, 5 seconds, back to overhead on the panel: they say what the front of the can says, word for word, and why you chose those words. Shot 5, 3 seconds, hands only: the can goes in the fridge, door closes, done. Three rules for the video. Nobody says "transparency," because the word has been laundered to death and it now signals the opposite. Nobody reads a legal disclaimer on camera. And if the person on camera cannot say the number without reading it off a card, they are the wrong person, so put whoever formulated it on camera instead. That person is usually not a marketer and usually better at this than anybody expects. ## The free internal move Take an hour and build the claims inventory. One page, one owner, every place a claim about your product currently appears: the can, the case, the shelf talker, your website, your Amazon bullets, every retailer's product page, your pinned post, the last three press releases, and the founder's answer on whatever podcast they did in the spring. Retailers copy your bullets word for word, and the complaint reads the bullets. A line you forgot you wrote in 2023 is still a line you wrote. Then draw one column next to it: is this a taste claim, a personality claim, or a measurable claim? The first two belong to whoever owns the voice. The third one does not, and never did, and the only reason it feels like it does is that nobody ever took it away. Most brands find between nine and thirty of these and are surprised by at least three. The surprising ones are almost never on the can. They're on a retailer page somebody set up two years ago and never looked at again. ## Listen, then go build The teardown is the show. This piece is the part you can use on Wednesday. If you want the full grade on Liquid Death, hook through retail loop, it's this week's [Shelf-Life](https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/shelf-life/), and you can subscribe on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id6785337858?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) or [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/033GwOHe2R5wgGoAu56rpL?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) and have the next one waiting Monday morning. If your feed and your label are being written by the same person in the same tab and that just landed a little hard, that's the conversation. Find me on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/galluccinet?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io).