Marvin McCarley and Ellyse McCarley, Plaintiffs/appellants v. West Quality Food Service D/b/a Kentucky Fried…

Summary

The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed summary judgment for Kentucky Fried Chicken in a food poisoning case, holding that KFC failed to carry its initial summary judgment burden of negating an essential element of the McCarleys' negligence claim, so the plaintiffs' burden of production was never triggered. The court held that causation in negligent food contamination cases may be established by expert testimony alone or through a combination of expert and lay testimony, and that an expert's inability to exclude every alternative contamination source affects weight rather than admissibility. Applying those principles, the court found that the treating physician's testimony identifying chicken as the leading potential source of Campylobacter, combined with lay testimony about the chicken's odor, appearance and taste, created a genuine issue of material fact for the jury.