Accused of greenwashing, an Oregon Supreme Court ruling brings new life to a six-year-old lawsuit against Tillamook County Creamery Association.
Verdant pastures and happy cows star in the commercials of Tillamook County Creamery Association — more commonly called Tillamook — but a recently revived lawsuit paints a different picture of the farmer-owned cooperative, nationally famous for its cheese and ice cream products.
While the company is headquartered in the idyllic coastal town of Tillamook, Oregon, the bulk of their products are made in the small town of Boardman, a majority Hispanic community located in an arid, north-central corner of the state. There, Tillamook runs an 85,000 square-foot factory that produces roughly 170 million pounds of cheese every year. More than 30,000 dairy cows are housed in concrete structures on the nearby Threemile Canyon Farms.
The lawsuit alleges that Tillamook misrepresents where their products come from in their “Dairy Done Right” and “Goodbye Big Food” marketing campaigns, distancing themselves from the realities of large-scale dairy production while charging a higher price.
“This case is on behalf of all of the folks who were paying a price premium for these allegedly small-scale-produced products when in fact they’re very mass-produced,” said Amanda Howell, an attorney at Animal Legal Defense Fund, one of the litigators in the case.
The case is one in a long line of class action lawsuits accusing dairy and other food companies of similar marketing deception.
In 2022, a lawsuit was filed against Organic Valley on behalf of a consumer who accused the company of misrepresenting the conditions its dairy cows are raised in. Another case, filed in 2019, accused the egg brand Nellie’s of cruelly treating its laying hens while purporting humane animal conditions on its egg packaging. Neither case has been settled by the courts.
Tillamook faces similar accusations.
“The advertising that I’ve seen from Tillamook is very focused on this old-time, pastoral idea of farmers who interact with each cow every day and they all have names and they’re munching grass on pasture on the coast,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety. “But there’s no pasture involved in Threemile Canyon’s operation.”
“The advertising that I’ve seen from Tillamook is very focused on this old-time, pastoral idea of farmers who interact with each cow every day.”
Tillamook adamantly disagrees with the accusations lobbed at them about deceptive marketing.
In a press statement, the company said that it “is true that not all of our milk and products originate from Tillamook County, and we’ve never hidden that fact.” It also said that it believes the case is “an unmerited attack initiated by the Animal Legal Defense Fund, anti-dairy activists who advocate for people to cut all dairy products from their diets, which only hurts the farming families of Oregon who own our co-op.”
The litigators disagree.
Howell of Animal Legal Defense Fund said that Tillamook’s marketing hurts “actual small-scale family farms” who have to charge higher prices in order to stay in business. “[The smaller producers] charge a premium price because they have to, and [Tillamook] is just charging a premium price because they can,” she said.
Something in the Water
In Boardman — where Threemile Canyon Farms is located — and the nearby town of Irrigon, some well water users have recorded nitrate levels five times the amount deemed safe by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Ingesting nitrate-polluted water can cause a whole slew of health problems, including stomach cancer in adults and blue baby syndrome in infants. Enough long-term exposure can be deadly.
“Out in this area, they’re seeing increased amounts of cancer,” van Saun said. “It’s notoriously hard to attribute exactly where those [cancer rates] come from, but it is known that high levels of nitrates cause these health problems.”
The state of Oregon established the Lower Umatilla Basin Groundwater Management Area in 1990 to mitigate the pollution, but progress has been slow. The nitrate pollution comes from many sources, including fertilizer, manure, septic systems, and wastewater, which makes staunching the pollution all the more difficult.
Some of the region’s most vocal advocates point to the region’s commercial farms, CAFOs, and local port authority as the primary polluters. A different class action lawsuit was filed in 2024 on behalf of five Boardman residents against Threemile Canyon Farms (Tillamook’s operation), Lamb Weston, Madison Ranches, Beef Northwest Feeders, and the Port of Morrow, accusing them of polluting the groundwater. No court decision has yet been made.
A Rocky Past and a Hazy Future
The lawsuit accusing Tillamook of marketing deception was originally filed on behalf of four Oregon consumers in 2019 by the Oregon-based law firm Sugerman Dahab and the California-based Animal Legal Defense Fund.
In 2020, a circuit court judge dismissed the case, saying that it didn’t qualify for class action status. This decision was affirmed in 2022 by the Oregon Court of Appeals, but in early April of 2025, the Oregon Supreme Court decided the case had merit and should be allowed to proceed.
“Their decision was not unexpected, especially given our understanding of the Unlawful Trade Practices Act and the expertise of our co-counsel who are long time consumer protection advocates in the state,” Howell said.
But the lawsuit’s future remains unclear: Now the lawsuit will proceed at square one in the state’s trial court, with no specific timeline for when a final verdict will be made on the six-year-old case.
