The family of a professional dancer who died after eating a mislabeled Stu Leonard cookie is suing a popular grocery chain, the cookie manufacturer and employees for wrongful death.
Orla Baxendale, 25, was rehearsing at a dance studio in Connecticut on January 11 when she suffered a severe allergic reaction to vanilla Florentine cookies containing peanuts sold by a chain of stores and went into anaphylactic shock.
Her family said the supermarket had failed to mention the risk of allergens on the packaging label.
The tragic incident was the result of “gross negligence and reckless indifference to the rights of others, and the willful and malicious violation of those rights” by experts who failed to state on the ingredients label that the cookies contained peanuts, Baxendale’s mother argued in a lawsuit filed Thursday.
According to the lawsuit, reviewed by The Washington Post, Baxendale’s family is seeking more than $15,000 in damages, in addition to monetary and punitive damages awarded by the court.
The lawsuit accuses the chain, its Connecticut branch where the boxes of cookies in question were purchased, and several employees of negligence for ignoring a notice issued by manufacturer Cookies United LLC on July 20, 2023, that Florentine cookies now contain peanuts.
At least 11 Stu Leonard’s employees received the email, but the supermarket did not update ingredient labels to include the new allergy risk, according to the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs allege that the mislabeling caused Baxendale, who had a “severe peanut allergy,” to eat the cookies and subsequently suffer a severe allergic reaction and die.
The lawsuit argues that the fact that Stu Leonard’s did in fact recall several products due to mislabeling or deficiencies in the weeks after Baxendale’s death is “further evidence that the grocery chain had a dysfunctional, unreliable and inherently dangerous system.”
The grocery chain’s president and CEO, Stu Leonard Jr., acknowledged his and the company’s responsibility for Baxendale’s death in a Jan. 24 video statement about the incident, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit also alleges that Cookies United should be held liable because it ultimately manufactured, packaged and sold the products to Stu Leonards.
The 45-page filing said multiple public regulators had issued public warnings to both the grocer and the manufacturer in their assessment of Baxendale’s death.
“Proper labeling is paramount so that people with food allergies can appropriately protect themselves,” Connecticut Public Health Commissioner Dr. Manisha Juthani said of the incident.
“I cannot stress enough the importance of raising awareness of food allergies so that avoidable tragedies like this never happen again,” Juthani said.
According to the lawsuit, Stu Leonard Inc. and Cookies United Inc. violated state and federal regulations by failing to accurately label Vanilla Florentine Cookies.
A representative for Stu Leonard’s declined to speak to The Washington Post about the lawsuit, and Cookies United did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Orla Baxendale is originally from Manchester, England and moved to New York City in 2018 to study at the Ailey School on a scholarship.
She has performed at New York Fashion Week and attended the Lincoln Center show.
