-- OPINION --
In food safety litigation, one of the most consequential, and often most contested, questions is not whether a product was contaminated, or even whether someone was harmed. It is whether the court has the power to hold the right defendants accountable in the first place. That question, always important, has taken on new urgency in light of a Salmonella outbreak linked to a greens-style dietary supplement that has now sickened at least 119 people across 36 states. As that litigation unfolds, a 2023 decision from the Southern District of New York — Albright v. Daily Harvest, Inc., No. 22cv5987, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 151783 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 25, 2023) — has emerged as a significant and directly relevant precedent for how courts approach supply chain accountability in food safety cases.
Background: The Daily Harvest outbreak
Readers of Food Safety News will remember the 2022 Daily Harvest outbreak. Daily Harvest, a subscription-based health food company with its principal place of business in New York, sold a product called French Lentil + Leek Crumbles that was linked to serious liver injuries in consumers — elevated liver enzymes, jaundice, and in some cases surgical intervention. The culprit ingredient was tara flour, produced by a Peruvian corporation called Molinos Asociados SAC.
The supply chain was layered: Molinos sold its tara flour to a U.S.-based distributor, which supplied it to a Minnesota contract manufacturer, which incorporated it into the finished product for Daily Harvest. When plaintiffs brought suit in the Southern District of New York — the logical forum, given Daily Harvest’s New York headquarters — Molinos moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. It argued that it was a Peruvian company that had never entered New York, maintained no office or facility there, and had no direct contractual relationship with any New York entity.
District Judge Denise Cote denied the motion in August 2023. My firm, Marler Clark, represented the majority of the plaintiffs in the class action litigation and successfully opposed the motion. Judge Cote’s opinion merits careful study.
What the Court Found
Judge Cote’s analysis centered on New York’s long-arm statute, CPLR § 302(a)(1), which permits a New York court to exercise personal jurisdiction over any non-domiciliary that “transacts any business within the state or contracts anywhere to supply goods or services in the state.” The statute is a “single act” statute; even one transaction with sufficient New York connections can be enough, even if the defendant never physically entered New York.
The critical facts were these. Molinos’s purchase order from the U.S. distributor explicitly required that the tara flour match Daily Harvest’s specifications —meaning Molinos understood precisely whose product requirements governed its manufacturing. The logistics documentation identified New York-based entities as participants in the importation chain. Molinos had copied Daily Harvest employees on email correspondence about shipping delays. And Molinos’s own internal presentation reflected that it had formally accepted Daily Harvest’s specifications through a supply chain management platform that identified Daily Harvest as a New York company.
Assessing the totality of that evidence, Judge Cote concluded that Molinos had “purposefully engaged with Smirk’s and Daily Harvest as it sold its tara flour for use in the manufacture of a product it understood would be sold by Daily Harvest, a New York company.” That purposeful commercial engagement, shaped by and directed at a New York entity, was sufficient to establish personal jurisdiction. The motion was denied.
Why the decision matters
The Daily Harvest ruling matters for reasons that extend well beyond the tara flour litigation.
First, it firmly establishes that physical presence in New York is not required for personal jurisdiction under CPLR § 302(a)(1). A foreign or out-of-state supplier that knows it is manufacturing to the specifications of a New York company, and that shapes its commercial conduct accordingly, has purposefully availed itself of the privilege of doing business connected to New York, even if its product never crossed the state line while in the supplier’s possession. The commercial relationship and the knowledge it reflects are what matter, not the geography of the production facility.
Second, the decision gives practical content to the “nexus” requirement of § 302(a)(1). Under the New York Court of Appeals’ controlling formulation in Licci v. Lebanese Canadian Bank, a plaintiff’s claim need only have “a relatedness” to the defendant’s New York-directed business activity such that it is “not completely unmoored” from that activity. Daily Harvest applies this standard in a multi-party supply chain context and establishes that contamination claims arising from an ingredient supplied for a New York company’s product satisfy the nexus requirement — even when multiple commercial intermediaries stand between the supplier and the forum.
Third, the decision signals that courts will look at the totality of a supplier’s commercial relationship with a New York entity. Suppliers who understand themselves to be serving a New York company, and conduct themselves accordingly, cannot disclaim that relationship for jurisdictional purposes when harm results.
The ongoing moringa outbreak: A stronger set of facts
The Daily Harvest decision has direct application to litigation arising from a Salmonella outbreak that, as of the most recent FDA update on June 12, has grown substantially since it first came to public attention in January. Litigation involving this outbreak is ongoing, and I will not identify specific parties, clients, or confidential case information. But the public record — and it is substantial — tells an important story.
As of May 27, 119 people have been sickened across 36 states and 32 have been hospitalized. The investigation was opened in January 2026, briefly closed, then reopened after 22 new illnesses emerged, suggesting contaminated product remained in circulation longer than initially understood. Traceback investigations have confirmed moringa leaf powder, contaminated with Salmonella Typhimurium and Salmonella Newport, as the source, with multiple recalls covering a greens-style supplement and two additional moringa capsule product lines linked to the same manufacturer.
The jurisdictional posture of this litigation parallels Daily Harvest in important ways, and in some respects presents a stronger case. In Daily Harvest, the upstream supplier’s connection to the New York forum ran through an intermediary chain: a Colorado distributor and a Minnesota manufacturer stood between the Peruvian flour producer and the New York brand owner. The supplier’s knowledge of the New York connection was established through logistics documents, copied emails, and specification compliance records.
In the moringa supplement litigation, at least some of the relationships at issue are direct: written agreements between the contract manufacturer and the New York brand owner, bearing the New York address on their face; product samples mailed to New York; commercial communications directed to New York; purchase orders issued from a New York address and invoices sent to a New York billing address. Where Daily Harvest established jurisdiction based on an indirect, intermediary-mediated relationship, the current litigation involves direct contractual ties of the kind that make the purposeful availment analysis considerably more straightforward.
The broader lesson: Supply chain length is not a defense
Civil litigation is one of the most powerful mechanisms available for holding the supply chain accountable, but only if the responsible parties are actually in court. None of that happens if upstream suppliers can obtain jurisdictional dismissals before a single document is produced.
Daily Harvest makes those dismissals harder to obtain, at least when the upstream supplier had a purposeful, documented commercial relationship with a New York entity. It stands for the proposition that the length of the supply chain is not, by itself, a jurisdictional defense. A supplier that understands itself to be serving a New York company — that meets that company’s specifications, coordinates with New York-based logistics partners, and directs commercial communications to New York-based personnel — has transacted business in New York in the sense that § 302(a)(1) requires. The fact that other commercial actors stand between the supplier and the end consumer does not change the analysis.
A final observation
The moringa outbreak is not over. As of April 2026, 32 people have been hospitalized and new illnesses were still being reported more than a year after the first cases emerged. The people sickened are not interested in legal abstractions about minimum contacts and purposeful availment. They are trying to hold accountable those responsible for placing a contaminated product into their hands. Daily Harvest matters because it ensures that mechanism remains available—that jurisdiction does not become a shield protecting upstream suppliers from accountability.
The supply chain is not a shield. The courts, it appears, are taking that principle seriously.
