A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit accusing Buffalo Wild Wings of misleading customers with its “boneless wings” name, ruling that the term would not deceive a reasonable consumer.
The case was filed in 2023 by Aimen Halim, who claimed he believed the chain’s boneless wings were traditional chicken wings with the bones removed. Instead, the product is made from pieces of chicken breast that are breaded, fried, and coated in sauce.
Halim brought the suit under the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act, along with claims for common law fraud, unjust enrichment, and breach of express warranty, and sought to represent a nationwide class of customers.
Court says term is not deceptive
In a February 17, 2026, memorandum opinion and order, Judge John J. Tharp Jr. ruled that while Halim had standing because he alleged economic harm, he failed to plausibly argue that the name “boneless wings” would mislead reasonable consumers.
“A reasonable consumer would not think that BWW’s boneless wings were truly deboned chicken wings, reconstituted into some sort of Franken-wing,” the judge said.
The court found that the phrase is commonly understood as a descriptive or “fanciful” term, not a literal claim that the product is deboned wing meat. The opinion compared the label to items like “chicken fingers,” noting that consumers do not expect them to be made from actual fingers.
Quoting a 2024 Ohio Supreme Court decision, the judge wrote: “A diner reading ‘boneless wings’ on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating ‘chicken fingers’ would know that he had not been served fingers.”
The court also pointed to pricing differences between traditional wings and boneless wings, as well as the fact that boneless wings have been widely sold for decades, as further context undermining the claim of deception.
