US court dismisses small firms' antitrust suit against protein bar maker David Protein
A US federal court has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit brought by three small food companies against David Protein over access to the fat substitute EPG. The judge found the plaintiffs had not plausibly defined the relevant market or shown harm to competition.
A US district judge, Victor Marrero, has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit against protein bar maker David Protein. The suit was filed by small food companies that accused David Protein of distorting competition in an emerging protein bar segment by restricting access to the fat substitute EPG. The ruling matters because it shows how far companies can go in locking up key ingredients, and how much access to specialized inputs can determine whether startups succeed.
How the dispute began
The litigation started in 2025, after David Protein acquired Epogee. Epogee makes a patented ingredient called EPG, which looks and functions like fat but has only a fraction of the calories: 0.7 per gram.
Three Epogee customers — OWN Your Hunger, Lighten Up Foods and Defiant Foods — said they had built their businesses around EPG, only to lose access abruptly. They accused David Protein of excluding competitors and creating an artificial monopoly. Several other former Epogee customers also gave sworn statements describing the harm they suffered after losing access.
David Protein responded that formulators had an "abundance" of alternatives to EPG, and that it was under no obligation to keep selling a patented ingredient to companies that had not signed long-term supply contracts.
The ruling
Lighten Up Foods recently decided to settle with David Protein, with each side bearing its own legal costs. The other two plaintiffs said they would keep fighting.
In his final order, in a case that has run for well over a year, Judge Marrero dismissed the suit on two grounds. First, he said the plaintiffs had failed to plausibly define the relevant product market. Second, even if the market for protein bars with a high share of calories from protein were the relevant one for antitrust purposes, they had not plausibly alleged that David's conduct harmed competition there.
"At bottom," Marrero said, "David bars are protein bars that are reasonably interchangeable with other protein bars."
AgFunderNews has asked both parties for comment.
