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Buffalo Wild Wings can continue to call its menu item “boneless wings” as such, a judge ruled Tuesday, dismissing a lawsuit that said the term amounted to false advertising.
US District Judge John Tharp in Illinois issued a 10-page ruling allowing the sports chain to continue calling its menu item “boneless wings,” after a Chicago man filed a lawsuit accusing the restaurant of false advertising, saying the boneless wings are priced higher because they are actually chicken thighs.
When Aimen Halim argued that Buffalo Wild Wings should call the product something like, “chicken poppers,” Tharp said the argument had no meat on its bones.
“Halim did not ‘state’ factual allegations to establish a claim,” Tharp wrote. “Although he stopped short of bringing suit because he alleges economic harm, he does not claim that reasonable consumers were misled by BWW’s use of the term ‘boneless wings.’
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A judge has ruled that Buffalo Wild Wings can continue to use the term “boneless wings” after dismissing a lawsuit that claimed the term was misleading. (Tiffany Hagler-Geard/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images)
Halim sued Buffalo Wild Wings shortly after he visited the restaurant in January 2023, claiming he was misled by the chain’s marketing.
Halim alleged that boneless wings are “chunks of chicken breast meat fried like wings,” and that customers would pay less for boneless wings or not buy them at all if they knew what was in the product.
Halim said he later regretted buying the item after learning how it was made, which he said caused him “financial damage due to the false and deceptive behavior of the defendants.”
In his ruling, Tharp said that while boneless wings are “basically chicken nuggets,” the product concept was not new, noting that Buffalo Wild Wings had been selling them since 2003.
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A federal judge has ruled that Buffalo Wild Wings’ boneless wings are not deceptive, dismissing a lawsuit over the menu item’s name. (iStock / Stock)
“Boneless wings are not a product that the consumer uses to do extensive research to find the truth,” he wrote. “Instead, ‘boneless wings’ is a common term that has been around for over two decades.”
Halim accused Buffalo Wild Wings of violating the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act, breach of express warranty, statutory fraud and unjust enrichment.
Tharp also cited an Ohio Supreme Court decision from 2024, in which the court ruled that “[a] a diner who reads ‘boneless wings’ on a menu is no more likely to believe that the restaurant certified the items to be boneless than to believe that the items are made from chicken wings, just as someone who eats ‘chicken fingers’ knows that they were not given the fingers.”
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A judge dismissed claims that Buffalo Wild Wings’ boneless wings misled customers. (Getty Images/Getty)
Tharp added that a “reasonable consumer” would not think that the chain’s boneless wings were “actually made of chicken bones, and then put together some kind of Franken-wing.”
The court allowed Halim to file an amended complaint on March 20, although Tharp noted that it was “hard to imagine” that he could provide additional facts that would show that Buffalo Wild Wings “perpetrated a fraudulent act.”
Landon Mion of FOX Business contributed to this report.
