A Staten Island man is trying to turn decades of mozzarella and ricotta history into a billion-and-a-half dollar payday in Brooklyn federal court.
Joseph Failla has filed a lawsuit over the Polly‑O cheese brand, asking a judge for roughly $1.5 billion. He claims his late father helped build the company’s Brooklyn reputation and that later corporate buyers cashed in on that legacy without ever cutting the family in. Court papers say Failla believes the trade name and "goodwill" his father bought decades ago were sold off and then exploited, and that the family has never been paid for the value of that reputation. He is representing himself in the case.
According to the complaint, filed in Brooklyn federal court, Failla is seeking about $1.5 billion in damages and alleges that his father, Vincent Failla, purchased the trade name G. Pollio & Sons and the company’s goodwill in 1967 for $5,000, the suit says, as reported by the New York Post. The filing contends that corporate successors later slapped the Polly‑O name on other products and sold the brand’s "Brooklyn" image back to consumers without paying for the reputation that had already been built. In court papers, Failla says those buyers benefited from his family’s labor while never paying a dime for the intangible value his father created.
Polly‑O’s story runs much longer than this latest legal twist. The brand traces its roots to 1899, when Italian immigrant Giuseppe Pollio opened a cheese shop in Brooklyn’s Coney Island and started handmaking ricotta and mozzarella, according to Wikipedia. The Pollio company eventually rebranded as Polly‑O and grew into a national seller of ricotta, mozzarella and string cheese. Most Polly‑O cheese is now produced in Campbell, New York, even though the name still trades on a Brooklyn origin story in the public eye.
Fast forward to the recent corporate shuffle. In 2020–21 Kraft Heinz agreed to sell its natural-cheese business to France’s Lactalis, and regulators ordered divestitures that ultimately cleared the way for BelGioioso to buy Polly‑O in 2021, according to Food Business News. Industry coverage puts the Polly‑O line at about $177 million in net sales in the year cited during those transactions, per Food Dive. After the deal, BelGioioso announced investments in Polly‑O’s New York plants as it folded the label into its wider Italian-cheese portfolio, and the company and state officials discussed expansion plans in a 2025 announcement.
"They attached it to their bird-branded cheese and sold it as real Brooklyn, 1899 heritage. All lies," Failla wrote in court papers, according to the New York Post. He argues that the brand’s authenticity and his father’s role in building it were central to Polly‑O’s market value, and that those intangible assets were never truly paid for as the business changed hands.
How 'Goodwill' Could Decide The Case
At the heart of Failla’s lawsuit is a somewhat squishy legal concept with very real money attached to it: "goodwill". In trademark law, goodwill is the reputation, customer loyalty and public perception that travel with a brand when it is properly transferred. Courts look skeptically at trademark assignments that move a name but not the underlying business, a setup sometimes called an assignment "in gross". If a buyer did not acquire enough of what gave the mark its meaning, the transfer can be challenged, legal analysts explain.
That doctrine, and the paper trail showing what was or was not actually transferred in earlier deals, could determine whether Failla can recover anything, according to experts and primers on trademark assignment and goodwill from LegalClarity. For now, the case adds a very local twist to a broader national story about who really owns the soul of a hometown brand. With the lawsuit just getting started in Brooklyn federal court and Failla acting as his own lawyer, the fight over Polly‑O’s past looks like it will be a long one.
