A man took a job at a coffee company and wound up with lung damage. A jury awarded him $5.3 million.
MILWAUKEE – Nick Moncel took a part-time job at a boutique coffee roaster in a small Wisconsin city in 2008.
The 63-year-old's new gig at Backroads Coffee in Hayward was straightforward: scoop 5 to 25 pounds of coffee from a bag and pour it into a roaster. After 20 minutes or so, open the chute and let the beans spill into the cooling pan. Once they're cool, add flavoring to the beans, grind or package them – in some cases, do all three. Then repeat.
For seven years Moncel did this, working six- to seven-hour shifts, two to four days a week, except during the holidays, when he worked most every day.
When Moncel quit in the summer of 2015, he didn’t know why he was so short of breath walking up even the slightest incline or why he was too exhausted to enjoy hunting, fishing or golfing, his favorite pastimes.
Then he came across an investigation in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the Paste BN Network, that published earlier the same year. “Gasping for Action” revealed how chemicals released in the process of roasting, grinding, flavoring and packaging coffee can destroy the lungs.
He wondered: Was that what had happened to him?
Last week, after a seven-day trial in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, a jury decided that, indeed, the chemicals were to blame for his illness.
The jury awarded Moncel $5.3 million in damages, among the first verdicts of its kind in the coffee processing industry.
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Moncel’s attorneys argued in the 2017 lawsuit that Flavor Development Corp., the New Jersey-based company that supplied the buttery-tasting chemical diacetyl to Backroads Coffee and its parent company, Midwest Roasters, knew of diacetyl’s dangers and failed to warn the roasters.
“Long before Mr. Moncel started working at Midwest Roasters, a medical and scientific consensus existed among independent scientists and physicians that these flavoring chemicals cause severe permanent lung disease,” attorneys wrote in a pretrial report.
Moncel’s attorneys declined the Journal Sentinel’s request to interview him after the verdict. However, in 2016 Moncel told the news organization that he had coughing spells that lasted 10 to 15 minutes every morning and that he no longer was able to enjoy gardening or any of his other hobbies.
“I just have a terrible time with anything physical,” he told the Journal Sentinel. “Two turns up the stairs and I’m done.”
Flavor Development Corp. argued that Moncel had a lifelong asthma diagnosis and heart disease and that he smoked cigarettes for many years. Any of those can contribute to lung disease, the company said. He also had a strong affection for woodworking – sawing and sanding – without wearing respiratory protection, which could also have played a role, the firm said.
“Mr. Moncel’s current medical condition is actually due to the mere fact that he is aging and has had a litany of medical problems and issues in his life,” defense attorneys argued in a pretrial report.
Attorneys for the company did not respond to messages from the Journal Sentinel seeking an interview about the case.
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Health concerns in coffee industry
The verdict comes amid a growing body of evidence that working with coffee in facilities that don’t have proper ventilation and engineering controls can be hazardous.
After the Journal Sentinel's series, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a research arm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, launched investigations in 2016 into two dozen coffee roasting and packaging facilities and found widespread exposure to high levels of harmful chemicals, such as diacetyl and 2,3-pentanedione.
At a small roastery in Pennsylvania, exposures to diacetyl were more than twice the recommended levels, and three of nine employees who were given lung function tests were found to have obstructed airways, according to a 2019 NIOSH study.
Workers at a larger coffee roasting plant in Minnesota were exposed to levels of diacetyl as high as 420 parts per billion, when the government’s recommended level is no more than 5 parts per billion. Workers commonly reported wheezing and whistling in the chest. Six of 99 had abnormal lung function tests, another NIOSH study found.
Like Moncel, one worker who showed a work-related pattern of respiratory symptoms was diagnosed with bronchiolitis obliterans, a serious and sometimes deadly lung disease.
In high concentrations, diacetyl attacks, inflames and virtually obliterates the bronchioles, the lung's tiniest airways. As the body tries to heal, scar tissue builds up and further restricts the airways. The damage is irreversible.
Diacetyl was first tied to hundreds of injuries and a handful of deaths of workers in the microwave popcorn industry in the early 2000s. In those cases, workers were exposed to high levels contained in the synthetic butter flavoring.
But diacetyl is also formed naturally during coffee roasting and is released in high concentrations when beans are ground and storage bins are opened.
In 2015, when the Journal Sentinel hired an industrial hygienist to test the air in two midsized Wisconsin roasteries that did not use synthetic flavorings, results showed workers who ground the coffee were exposed to some of the highest levels of the lung-crippling chemicals.
NIOSH researchers later confirmed the news organization’s findings and went on to uncover similar problems at coffee plants across the country.
Ben Fadler, one of Moncel’s attorneys, said Tuesday that he suspects there are hundreds if not thousands of workers who may have been exposed to diacetyl in the workplace and don’t know it and don’t know why they’re struggling to breathe.
“The flavoring industry was watching this trial and wanted to know if the jury in Wisconsin would think this was OK,” Fadler said. “And the jury responded with a resounding, ‘No, you can’t do this to people.’”
Follow reporter Raquel Rutledge on Twitter: @RaquelRutledge.
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