Everyone but Kraft Wins as Cheese Contest Goes Awry

Any way you slice it, Kraft General Foods comes out the loser in a weekend contest promoting cheese that inadvertently produced too many winners for a single grand prize.

Accusing the printer that prepared the game pieces of botching the job, Kraft on Tuesday declared its “Ready to Roll” game “null and void because of an error in printing.”

“Instead of only a limited number of winning game pieces, essentially all of the game pieces appear to be winning ones,” said Michael Caruso, a Kraft spokesman at headquarters in the Chicago suburb of Glenview. He declined to identify the printer.

On behalf of miffed contestants, attorney Jay E. DeGroot filed a class-action lawsuit Tuesday in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago. “A couple of people called us,” he said. DeGroot described the action as a breach of contract suit but declined to elaborate.

Caruso said the company contends that it is “not liable for any legal action because the contest was deceptive.” Caruso said Kraft is evaluating how to compensate would-be winners.

The game required entrants to match a “right-half” coupon inserted into Sunday newspapers in Chicago and Houston with the “left-half” coupon found inside specially marked packages of Kraft Singles cheese slices.

Matched pairs were to be redeemed for whatever they depicted: one of 500 skateboards, one of 100 bicycles, one of 8,000 free packages of cheese, or, at odds of 15 million to 1, a 1990 Dodge Caravan LE valued at $17,000.

However, Kraft realized that the job had been bungled when, by one estimate, as many as 100 people in the Chicago area called claiming to have won the van.

Even if Kraft, a unit of Philip Morris Cos., wriggles out of having to honor all winning entries, the company’s reputation could suffer in the short run.

“Any time something like this happens in the industry, it hurts all of us because it raises doubt in the consumer’s mind,” said Ken Fehskens, president of Ventura Associates, a service that runs sales promotions and contests.

To Chicagoans, the unintentionally generous game was reminiscent of a 1986 Beatrice Cos. promotion connected with Monday night football game scores.

In that case, Frank Maggio, a Georgia man working at the time for rival Procter & Gamble, cracked a pattern in the contest scratch-off cards and came up with 4,018 winning entries worth, by his count, $16 million. When Beatrice refused to honor them, he sued and eventually won a settlement that has been estimated at several million dollars.

DeGroot’s law firm, Lawrence W. Leck & Associates, filed a separate class-action suit on behalf of 2,400 plaintiffs in that case and reportedly won a $2-million settlement last year.