OKLAHOMA CITY — It pays to read and heed a warning label.
Renee Cronemeyer learned this the hard way when trial and appellate courts rejected her claims in a lawsuit filed after she sustained a second-degree burn from a product served at a fast-food eatery.
Cronemeyer sued Whataburger Restaurants in May 2020 in Cleveland County District Court, alleging negligence and seeking “in excess of $75,000.”
After swimming at her sister’s house on July 1, 2019, Cronemeyer and her sister drove to a Whataburger restaurant in Norman and ordered food via the drive-through lane. The order included a Hot Lemon Pie.
When Cronemeyer bit into a corner of the pie, filling spilled out of the other side, fell onto her shirt and then onto her upper thighs, she testified in a deposition.
Cronemeyer went to the emergency room at Chickasaw National Medical Center, where she was diagnosed with a second-degree burn on her right thigh and received a topical antibiotic ointment. In her lawsuit she claimed the injury also caused permanent scarring.
The Hot Lemon Pie was served to Cronemeyer in a “standard orange and white pie carton” with which nothing was “visibly amiss.” The warning, “CAUTION: CONTENTS ARE HOT,” was printed on the side of the carton, and Cronemeyer acknowledged that she saw the warning before biting into the pie.
In her deposition, she said she had bought Hot Lemon Pies from Whataburger previously and understood that the food was “supposed to be served hot,” but said that did not mean she understood that “the pie filling was capable of causing a second-degree burn.”
“Heat is an essential attribute of a Hot Lemon Pie,” Whataburger responded.
During her deposition Cronemeyer testified that she was wearing a swimsuit and shorts at the time of the incident, and admitted that “had she been wearing jeans at the time, she likely would not have been burned.”
District Judge Thad Balkman ruled in favor of Whataburger and dismissed the lawsuit on Sept. 16, 2022. Cronemeyer appealed to the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals.
There is no duty to “protect or warn about dangers readily apparent and observable,” the civil appeals court wrote in a 1992 case. A landowner is not required to “protect the invitee against dangers which are so apparent and readily observable that one would reasonably expect them to be discovered,” the court wrote in another case in 1996.
Whataburger cited a 1995 state case in which the court held that a supplier of a product “is not negligent when failing to warn against patent or open and obvious dangers involved with the use of their products.”
The appeals court pointed out that Cronemeyer “was not compelled … to purchase the Hot Lemon Pie … and did so under her own free will.” Additionally, the warning on the pie was “legally adequate,” the appellate court ruled on Dec. 2.
The Norman Whataburger case was reminiscent of the 1992 incident when a 79-year-old widow visiting a McDonald’s restaurant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was scalded with a cup of coffee whose temperature was estimated at 180 to 190 degrees. The victim sustained second- and third-degree burns.
The woman sued McDonald’s after the corporation refused to pay her medical bills, which exceeded $10,000. During pretrial discovery McDonald’s admitted it had received more than 700 complaints about burns from hot beverages during the preceding 10 years.
A jury awarded the elderly woman $160,000 in compensatory damages plus $500,000 in punitive damages, and subsequently McDonald’s lowered its coffee-brewing temperature 10 degrees.