This guy really wanted to be buttered up.
A Massachusetts man sued over 20 Dunkin’ Donuts — because he says they smeared his bagels with a butter substitute.
Jan Polanik filed a pair of lawsuits in Suffolk Superior Court this month — and got a settlement out of it, though it wasn’t clear how much, The Boston Globe reported.
The suits, claimed to represent any customer who “ordered a baked product, such as a bagel, with butter, but instead received margarine or butter substitute between June 24, 2012, and June 24, 2016,” The Globe reported.
Polanik’s attorney, Thomas Shapiro, initially wondered whether a butter gripe warranted a lawsuit in the first place.
“Candidly, it seems like a really minor thing, and we thought twice or three times about whether to bring a lawsuit or not,” Shapiro told the Globe.
But he decided to go for it, noting that, “a lot of people prefer butter.”
“The main point of the lawsuit is to stop the practice of representing one thing and selling a different thing,” Shapiro said. “It’s a minor thing, but at the same time, if somebody goes in and makes a point to order butter for the bagel…they don’t want margarine or some other kind of chemical substitute.”
In 2013, a Dunkin’ Donuts spokeswoman told the Globe that it uses a “butter-substitute vegetable spread” when customers order a buttered bagel.
“For food safety reasons, we do not allow butter to be stored at room temperature, which is the temperature necessary for butter to be easily spread onto a bagel or pastry,” the spokeswoman said. “As a result, the recommended in-store procedure…is that individual whipped butter packets be served on the side of a guest’s bagel or pastry but not applied. The vegetable spread is generally used if the employee applies the topping.”
The company told The Globe it wasn’t aware of Polanik’s lawsuit — but a spokeswoman said most of Dunkin’s stores in the Bay State “carry both individual whipped butter packets, and a butter-substitute vegetable spread.”