David Protein has spent the past year fighting two separate legal battles that keep getting mashed into one story. They aren’t the same case, they didn’t end the same way, and only one of them is actually over.

SnackStack covered the early rounds of both fights in June. Here is where things stand now that the docket has had time to move.

The Labeling Suit Is Done

The simpler case first. In January, a group of consumers filed Lopez et al. v. Linus Technologies, Inc. (1:26-cv-00635, S.D.N.Y.), alleging David’s Nutrition Facts panels understated calories and fat by wide margins, with lab testing cited in the complaint claiming differences as high as 400% on fat.[1] David disputed the testing methodology, arguing it didn’t properly account for EPG’s resistance to digestion. On March 31, 2026, the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the case without prejudice.[1][2] Without prejudice means the same claims could theoretically be refiled, but for now, the labeling suit is closed, and there was no ruling on the merits of either side’s numbers.

The Antitrust Fight Narrowed. It Didn’t End.

The more consequential case is OWN Your Hunger LLC, Lighten Up Foods LLC, and Defiant Foods LLC v. Linus Technology Inc., Epogee LLC, and Peter Rahal (1:25-cv-04544, S.D.N.Y.). This is the one about EPG itself, the ultra-low-calorie fat replacer that makes David’s macro math possible.

The timeline matters. David completed its acquisition of Epogee, then the sole commercial producer of EPG, in May 2025, backed by a $75 million Series A led by Greenoaks with Valor Equity Partners.[3] Around the same time, Epogee told several existing customers it would no longer accept new EPG orders. Three of them, OWN Your Hunger, Lighten Up Foods, and Defiant Foods, sued, arguing the acquisition let David cut off competitors’ access to an ingredient they had already built entire product lines around.

Judge Victor Marrero denied the plaintiffs’ request for emergency injunctive relief in 2025, and on February 4, 2026, he granted David’s motion to dismiss the operative complaint, ruling that plaintiffs hadn’t adequately defined the relevant market where David allegedly holds monopoly power.[4] Rather than close the case outright, Marrero gave plaintiffs a narrow window to fix that problem.[5] They took it. A Third Amended Complaint followed on April 3, 2026, this time defining the market narrowly as “high calories-from-protein” bars,[6] and David responded on May 1 by asking the court to throw the case out for good, this time with prejudice.[7]

That motion appears never to have been ruled on. Instead, on June 15, 2026, Judge Marrero signed a Stipulation and Order of Voluntary Dismissal, filed jointly by the parties. Read the docket text closely, though: it dismisses, with prejudice, only the claims of Lighten Up Foods.[8] OWN Your Hunger and Defiant Foods aren’t party to that stipulation and remain active plaintiffs. Neither side’s public filings explain why Lighten Up walked away, and nothing in the record describes a cash settlement or discloses new terms. It reads like what it says it is: one plaintiff left, two are still suing.

That distinction matters because Rahal has given interviews since then describing the antitrust case in the past tense, telling reporters some version of “that case was dismissed.” As of this writing, that overstates it. One-third of the plaintiffs got dismissed. The other two are still in litigation.

Why an Ingredient Company Is Worth Fighting Over

Strip away the docket numbers and the real story is about vertical integration. Epogee wasn’t just a supplier, it was the only supplier of a patented ingredient that several brands had built their calorie claims around. When David bought the company that made its core input, it didn’t just secure its own supply chain, it gained leverage over every competitor who depended on the same molecule. That’s a legitimate business move. It’s also exactly the kind of move antitrust law exists to scrutinize, which is why a federal judge has now spent over a year deciding whether “we bought our supplier” crosses into “we bought a monopoly.”

For the rest of the functional-snack category, the lesson isn’t about EPG specifically. It’s about what happens when a novel ingredient becomes load-bearing for an entire product’s marketing claim. The more a brand’s pitch depends on a single patented input, the more that input’s ownership becomes a strategic question, not just a sourcing one. David won the acquisition and, so far, most of the courtroom rounds. Whether it wins the whole case is still an open question, and two plaintiffs are still paying lawyers to ask it.