Olive Pits in Iowa

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled [PDF] in September that a failure-to-warn claim could survive summary judgment, notwithstanding the foreign-natural doctrine:

Plaintiff has alleged that he opened a jar of pimento-stuffed, green  olives, which had been imported and sold at wholesale by defendants.  He  alleges that he used several of these olives, which bore the label Italica  Spanish Olives, in the preparation of a salad and, when eating the salad, bit  down on an olive pit or pit fragment and fractured a tooth.   

* * *

We are satisfied that, in the case of processed foods, consumers may  develop reasonable expectations that certain components of food products  in their natural state that serve to impede human consumption will be  removed.  Specifically, we believe that the purchaser of pimento-stuffed  olives may reasonably anticipate that the olive pits have been removed.  We  need not decide whether this expectation would create an implied warranty  of merchantability because such a claim is precluded by statute in the  present case.  We are convinced, however, that a seller of stuffed olives  must be cognizant that consumers will assume that the olives will be free  from pits and act on that assumption in consuming the product.