Primetime Live
In the 1990s, Food Lion gained a degree of notoriety when it was the subject of an ABC News investigation. ABC had received a tip about unsanitary practices at Food Lion. Two ABC reporters had posed as Food Lion employees, and witnessed the unsanitary practices at Food Lion. Much of what they had seen was videotaped with cameras hidden in wigs that they were wearing. The footage was then featured in a segment on the news magazine Primetime Live, in which Food Lion employees described unsanitary practices, which included bleaching discolored, expired pork with Clorox and repackaging expired meats with new expiration dates, and the use of nail polish remover to remove the expiration dates from dairy item packages.
The company responded by suing ABC for fraud, claiming that the ABC employees misrepresented themselves; for trespassing, because the ABC employees came on to Food Lion property without permission; and for breach of loyalty, the ABC employees videotaped non-public areas of the store and revealed internal company information. During the court battles between Food Lion and ABC, over 40 hours of unused footage were released that helped Food Lion's case. In the unused footage, two undercover producers are seen trying to encourage violations of company policy; however, employees resisted and correctly followed sanitary practices.
Food Lion was awarded US$5.5 million by a jury in 1997. The award was later reduced by a judge to $316,000. The verdict was then overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia. According to the court, even though ABC was wrong to do what they had done, Food Lion was not suing for defamation, but rather for tort, as a way to get around the strict First Amendment standards for defamation. Food Lion did this, because at the time of the lawsuit they were unable to prove that ABC acted with malice, which would be required to prove defamation.
An indirect result was that Food Lion ended up exiting the Houston, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex markets, which it had recently entered. The Dallas/Fort Worth market is highly competitive, and the stores were already being criticized for being too small and lacking the amenities desired by the local shoppers—for example, Food Lion did not include pharmacies in its stores.
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