Tag: juul
Juul Shipped One Million Contaminated Pods, Says Former Exec
“Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said.
SAN FRANCISCO — A former Juul executive is alleging in a lawsuit that the fast-growing startup shipped out 1 million contaminated e-cigarette pods earlier this year — but did not tell customers or issue a recall.
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday by Siddharth Breja, a former senior vice president of global finance who worked at the San Francisco–based company from May 2018 to March 2019. In the lawsuit — filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California on the same day that Juul confirmed its plans to lay off about 500 people — Breja claims he was retaliated against for raising concerns about the contaminated shipment.
In another instance, Breja says he was worried when the company, in February 2019, wanted to resell pods that were at that point almost one year old. He protested their resale and urged the company to at least include an expiration or “best by” date, or a date of manufacture, on the packaging.
The lawsuit claims that then-CEO Kevin Burns shot down that idea, saying, “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods.”
Burns, who was replaced by Altria executive K.C. Crosthwaite in September, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Mr. Breja became aware of very concerning actions at the company, and he performed his duty to shareholders and to the board by reporting these issues internally,” Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney for Breja, told BuzzFeed News when reached for comment. “In exchange for doing that, he was inappropriately terminated. This is very concerning, particularly since some of the issues he raised concerned matters of public safety.”
A Juul spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Juul is fighting off a firestorm from government agencies, public health advocates, and clinicians, who blame the e-cigarette giant for addicting millions of teens to nicotine. A nationwide lung injury outbreak, now standing at 1,604 cases and 34 deaths, is being investigated by public health agencies, which have primarily linked the illnesses to vaping black-market THC. But the connection to nicotine-containing devices, such as Juul, has not been fully ruled out, either.
Breja alleges that on March 12, in an executive team meeting, he learned that some batches of mint e-liquid had been found to be contaminated. Approximately 250,000 mint refill kits, the equivalent of one million pods, were manufactured with the contaminated e-liquid, shipped to retailers, and sold to customers.
Breja was concerned about the public’s safety, the lawsuit alleges, especially in the wake of consumers recently having reported seizures after Juuling.
And he was asked to charge the supplier of the e-liquid, Alternative Ingredients, Inc., for $7 million for the contaminated batches. (That company did not immediately return a request for comment.) Breja was concerned by “this hypocritical approach of not informing the customers about the contamination on one hand (claiming it was not a serious issue) and charging the supplier for it on the other hand,” according to the lawsuit.
That same day, Breja “protested Juul’s refusal to issue a product recall for the contaminated pods, or at a minimum issue a public health and safety notice to consumers.” Tim Danaher, the chief finance officer at the time, reportedly “questioned his financial acumen,” since these suggestions would lead to billions of dollars in lost sales and hurt Juul’s then–$38 billion valuation, according to the lawsuit.
Danaher, whose departure was announced by the company on Tuesday, allegedly told Breja that he should remember his loyalty to Juul. (Danaher did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
According to the lawsuit, Breja was terminated on March 21, just over a week after he raised concerns about the contaminated pods. He was told it was because he had misrepresented himself as the chief financial officer at Uber. Breja says that he never made that claim, but had accurately stated that he was the chief financial officer of a division of Uber. Juul’s claim is “preposterous” and “intentionally invented” to hurt Breja’s reputation and employment prospects, the lawsuit alleges.
Article via BuzzFeedNews
FDA Barges In on Vape Maker Juul, Seizes ‘Thousands’ of Documents
In its ongoing crusade against rad teens, the Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it made a surprise inspection of the headquarters of Juul Labs, which is under investigation for potentially marketing e-cigarettes to children. The “unannounced on-site inspection,” executed on Friday, resulted in the seizure of “thousands of pages of documents,” according to the FDA.
The surprise inspection of Juul continues an aggressive new chapter in the FDA’s war on the “epidemic” of underage vaping, as FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb recently put it. The agency has cracked down on e-cigarette businesses in general and Juul in particular.
“The JUUL inspection, which we completed on Friday, sought further documentation related to JUUL’s sales and marketing practices, among other things, and resulted in the collection of over a thousand pages of documents,” the FDA said in a statement emailed to Gizmodo. “The inspection followed the Agency’s request for information that we issued to JUUL Labs in April for documents that would help us to better understand the reportedly high rates of youth use and the youth appeal of JUUL products, including documents related to marketing and product design.”
In a statement emailed to Gizmodo, Juul CEO Kevin Burns said his company plans to work with the FDA and other parties to prevent underage vaping and characterized the FDA’s surprise inspection on its headquarters as a “meeting.”
“We are committed to preventing underage use, and we want to engage with FDA, lawmakers, public health advocates and others to keep JUUL out of the hands of young people. The meetings last week with FDA gave us the opportunity to provide information about our business from our marketing practices to our industry-leading online age-verification protocols to our youth prevention efforts. It was a constructive and transparent dialogue,” Burns said. “We’ve now released over 50,000 pages of documents to the FDA since April that support our public statements. We look forward to presenting our plan to address youth access in the 60-day time frame as outlined by FDA. We want to be part of the solution in preventing underage use, and we believe it will take industry and regulators working together to restrict youth access.”
While there are hundreds of e-cigarettes on the market, Juul remains the most popular, especially among teenagers, according to Nielsen, which found that Juul represented nearly 55 percent of the e-cigarette retail market as of March.
In late August, the New York Times reported that management within PAX Labs, which created Juul before it spun off into its own company, knew the company’s e-cigarettes were widely popular with teenagers and still failed to tweak its marketing strategy, according to a former senior manager at PAX. Last month, the FDA announced that it had issued 1,300 “warning letters” and fines to brick-and-mortar e-cigarette retailers that the agency said it had busted selling Juul vapes to minors during an “undercover blitz” carried out this summer.
Although e-cigarettes are believed to be somewhat safer than tobacco cigarettes, and users can vape without nicotine, evidence shows they are still not safe, particularly for teens’ still-developing brains.
Article via: FDA Barges In on Vape Maker Juul, Seizes ‘Thousands’ of Documents