Popcorn Lung Lawsuit Verdicts: Worker, Consumer, and Failed Cases

Popcorn lung lawsuits are product-liability and negligence cases brought by workers and consumers who developed bronchiolitis obliterans — an irreversible scarring of the lungs’ smallest airways — after inhaling diacetyl, the chemical long used to give microwave popcorn, cooking sprays, and other foods their buttery flavor. Factory-worker cases have produced verdicts and settlements exceeding $100 million in aggregate, with individual awards climbing as high as $30 million. Consumer cases have been rarer and harder to win, though a 2012 Colorado verdict and a $25 million California verdict in 2026 show that they can succeed when the exposure history is long and the medical picture is clean.¹²

The Injury Behind the Lawsuits

Diacetyl (2,3-butanedione) is a compound with a strong buttery taste and smell. Heated, it goes airborne, and prolonged inhalation can scar the bronchioles deep in the lungs. The resulting disease, bronchiolitis obliterans, looks like asthma or chronic bronchitis but does not respond to those treatments and is largely irreversible. Severe cases end in a lung transplant.²

The workplace link surfaced first. In May 2000, eight former workers at a microwave-popcorn plant in Missouri were reported to the state health department with bronchiolitis obliterans, all sickened between 1993 and 2000.³ A NIOSH investigation at that plant found current workers had 3.3 times the expected rate of airway obstruction, and among workers who had never smoked, the rate was 10.8 times higher than normal. NIOSH described a “strong exposure-response relationship” between cumulative diacetyl exposure and airway damage.¹

Diagnosis is itself a legal problem. Conclusive confirmation typically requires a lung biopsy, an invasive procedure with real risks, and the symptoms — cough, wheezing, shortness of breath — overlap with far more common conditions. That has repeatedly given defendants an opening to argue the plaintiff never had the disease at all.⁴

Worker Verdicts

The earliest and largest cluster of claims came out of the Gilster-Mary Lee popcorn plant in Jasper, Missouri, where NIOSH had documented the diacetyl-disease link. After those findings, workers sued the flavoring manufacturers rather than the popcorn maker.

Eric and Cassandra Peoples

In 2004, a Jasper County jury awarded plant worker Eric Peoples $18 million and his wife Cassandra $2 million in a suit against International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) and its subsidiary Bush Boake Allen, which had supplied the butter flavoring. Doctors testified that Peoples had 24 percent of his lung capacity left and would eventually need a double-lung transplant. The manufacturers appealed, and Peoples settled the appeal for an undisclosed amount.⁵¹

Linda Redman

Linda Redman started as a packer at the same plant in 1994 and was forced to quit within roughly 18 months as her breathing failed. By 2004 she had 15 percent lung capacity and needed oxygen and breathing treatments every four hours. She was one of 30 workers who sued Bush Boake Allen and IFF; her case reached a Jasper County jury in April 2004 but settled for an undisclosed sum just before verdict. Redman died on April 30, 2006, while waiting for a lung transplant, the first of the Jasper plaintiffs to die.¹⁶

According to a congressional report supporting the Popcorn Workers Lung Disease Prevention Act, hundreds of former plant workers sued companies that supplied or manufactured diacetyl, and more than $100 million was awarded by juries or paid in settlements across those cases.¹

Solis v. BASF

Gerardo Solis spent more than 20 years in Chicago-area popcorn and flavoring plants, most recently at Flavorchem, which bought diacetyl from BASF. Diagnosed in 2006 with 75 percent lung damage, he alleged that BASF’s Material Safety Data Sheets failed to disclose a 1993 study showing acute inhalation toxicity in rats and that the company did not add bronchiolitis obliterans warnings until June 2006. In August 2010, a Cook County jury awarded $32 million, assigning 5 percent fault to Solis for a net award of $30.4 million.⁷⁸

The verdict didn’t hold. In October 2012, the Illinois Appellate Court reversed and ordered a new trial, finding that the trial judge had improperly directed a verdict for Solis on the statute of limitations. The appellate court held that evidence suggested Solis may have known of his injury and its cause before September 2005, which would have put his 2007 claim outside the two-year window.⁹⁸

Aregood v. Givaudan Flavors

Twenty-seven workers at a ConAgra Snack Foods plant in Rensselaer, Indiana, sued flavoring supplier Givaudan Flavors Corp. Senior Judge Sarah Evans Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana granted summary judgment to Givaudan on the workers’ final remaining claim, defective product design, ruling that the plaintiffs failed to present expert testimony on the cost-effectiveness of diacetyl-free alternatives. Cost-benefit analysis, the judge noted, is not “common knowledge” and required expert substantiation the workers never provided.¹⁰

Consumer Verdicts

Cases brought by ordinary users of popcorn or cooking spray have faced a steeper climb. The core problem: the exposure at a home stovetop or microwave is a fraction of what a plant worker inhales on a shift, and courts have repeatedly asked plaintiffs to close that gap with hard evidence rather than analogy.

Wayne Watson

Wayne Watson, a Colorado furniture salesman, ate about two bags of butter-flavored microwave popcorn a day for roughly a decade. In 2007, Dr. Cecile Rose of the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver diagnosed him with bronchiolitis obliterans after ruling out other explanations. Rose, who had studied the disease in factory workers, told federal regulators that while she could not be certain, “we have no other plausible explanation.”²

Watson sued Gilster-Mary Lee Corp., the Kroger grocery chain, and Kroger subsidiary Dillon Companies, which operates the King Soopers stores where he bought the popcorn. He also sued flavor developer FONA International Inc. (formerly Flavors of North America), which settled before trial. In September 2012, a Denver federal jury awarded Watson $7.2 million, finding the defendants negligent for failing to warn that inhaling the buttery smell from microwaved popcorn could be dangerous. The jury assigned 80 percent of the fault to Gilster-Mary Lee and 20 percent to Kroger and Dillon.¹¹ The defendants had argued Watson’s condition came from earlier work with carpet cleaning chemicals. The court later reduced the award to just over $3 million.¹²¹³

Roland Esparza and PAM Cooking Spray

The largest recent consumer verdict came in February 2026, when a Los Angeles Superior Court jury unanimously awarded $25 million to Roland Esparza, a 58-year-old former bodybuilder and martial artist who developed bronchiolitis obliterans after years of regularly using PAM butter-flavored cooking spray. Esparza had used the product since the 1990s, filed suit in 2022, and his disease was severe enough to require a double lung transplant.¹⁴

The jury found that Conagra failed to warn consumers about the risks of inhaling PAM’s fumes. Conagra argued diacetyl had been removed from the formulation in 2009, but the jury was not persuaded the company had proved that point. Conagra has said it disagrees with the verdict and intends to “pursue all available legal avenues to contest” it.¹⁵¹⁴

Stults v. International Flavors and Fragrances

David Stults said he developed bronchiolitis obliterans after 20 years of eating up to three bags of microwave popcorn daily and slowly opening each fresh bag to inhale the aroma. His case went to trial on a breach-of-implied-warranty claim against IFF and Bush Boake. Plaintiffs’ doctors attributed his disease to diacetyl; IFF’s experts testified the condition was autoimmune or rheumatoid in origin, pointing to joint and respiratory symptoms Stults had reported as early as 1993. IFF also argued consumer-level diacetyl exposure from popcorn is “insignificant” compared to a factory worker’s. The jury sided with IFF, and in March 2016 the Eighth Circuit affirmed the defense verdict, holding that the conflicting expert testimony properly left causation to the jury.¹⁶¹⁷

Newkirk v. ConAgra Foods

Larry Newkirk sued ConAgra, alleging that eating Act II microwave popcorn caused bronchiolitis obliterans. In 2010, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Washington granted summary judgment to ConAgra after excluding the testimony of the plaintiffs’ expert, Dr. David Egilman. The court found Egilman had failed to bridge the gap between the industrial-exposure studies he relied on and the much lower exposures a home consumer would encounter. The court also noted Newkirk had never undergone a lung biopsy and so lacked a conclusive diagnosis.⁴

Why Many Popcorn Lung Lawsuits Fail

Plaintiffs pursue these cases on several theories: failure to warn, strict products liability, common law negligence, and breach of implied warranty. Consumer-fraud claims sometimes appear but are typically dismissed for lack of standing where no physical injury has manifested.¹³ The cases that fail tend to fail in the same handful of ways.

Causation is hard to prove. A plaintiff must show both that diacetyl can cause bronchiolitis obliterans and that it did cause it in their particular case. Regulatory agencies have not established a firm causal link, epidemiological studies have been inconsistent, and animal studies have often produced injury in the upper airways rather than the deep bronchioles affected in human patients.¹³
Consumer exposure levels differ sharply from industrial ones. In Newkirk and Stults, courts and defense experts leaned on the gulf between daily plant-floor exposure and the puff of vapor from a popcorn bag.
Diagnosis is elusive. Without a lung biopsy, which is risky and not always definitive, courts have questioned whether a plaintiff actually has bronchiolitis obliterans as opposed to a more ordinary respiratory disease.⁴
Alternative explanations exist. Defendants have persuaded juries and judges that a plaintiff’s problems came from autoimmune disease, smoking, or exposure to other chemicals at work or home.¹⁶
Statute-of-limitations traps. As in Solis, a large verdict can be reversed if the plaintiff knew or should have known about the injury and its cause before the filing window closed.⁸

Defendants have also invoked Federal Rule of Evidence 407 to keep jurors from hearing that a manufacturer later removed diacetyl from its products, arguing that such “subsequent remedial measures” cannot be used as evidence of negligence or defective design.¹⁸

Where Diacetyl Still Turns Up

Major popcorn manufacturers removed diacetyl from their products in 2007, and the PAM litigation turns partly on Conagra’s claim that it reformulated the cooking spray in 2009. Some manufacturers replaced diacetyl with other alpha-diketone compounds that researchers have warned may pose similar respiratory risks, meaning “diacetyl-free” is not always the end of the question.¹⁹²⁰

Diacetyl has also been detected in e-cigarette liquids: a Harvard Chan School of Public Health study found it in more than 75 percent of flavored e-cigarettes tested. There are no governmental restrictions on diacetyl levels in e-liquids, and manufacturers are not required to disclose its presence. As of 2026, no lawsuits specifically alleging that e-cigarette diacetyl exposure caused popcorn lung have been reported.²¹

1
GovInfo. Popcorn Workers Lung Disease Prevention Act, House Report 110-239
2
CBS News. Colorado Man Wayne Watson Wins $7 Million in Popcorn Lung Lawsuit
3
New England Journal of Medicine. Bronchiolitis Obliterans in Workers in a Microwave-Popcorn Plant
4
CaseMine. Newkirk v. ConAgra Foods, Inc.
5
Times Enterprise. Couple That Won $20 Million Lawsuit Files for Bankruptcy
6
Joplin Globe. Ex-Popcorn Plant Worker Dies
7
NBC Chicago. $30 Million Awarded to Popcorn Lung Sufferer
8
FindLaw. Solis v. BASF Corporation
9
Wisconsin Law Journal. Court Tosses $30.4M Popcorn Lung Verdict
10
The Indiana Lawyer. Judge Rules Against Workers in Popcorn Lung Lawsuit
11
ABC Australia. Popcorn Payout
12
NPR. Man Wins $7 Million in Suit Claiming Microwave Popcorn Caused Lung Disease
13
IADC. Cigarettes and Coffee: Do Newly Discovered Sources of Diacetyl Spell the End of Popcorn Lung Litigation
14
Chicago Tribune. PAM Cooking Spray Conagra Lung Disease
15
Expert Institute. Conagra PAM Diacetyl Verdict
16
Courthouse News Service. Eighth Circuit Throws Out Popcorn Lung Suit
17
Justia. Stults v. International Flavors and Fragrances, Inc.
18
Cozen O’Connor. Consumer-Driven Diacetyl Litigation: Boom or Bust
19
Chemical & Engineering News. Popcorn Minus Diacetyl
20
PubMed. Diacetyl Substitutes and Alpha-Diketone Risk
21
American Lung Association. Popcorn Lung: A Dangerous Risk of Flavored E-Cigarettes