Joint Juice Claimants Say the $90 Million Settlements Are Paying by Emailed Check. In New York They Report $402.78 — by Our Math Six Units at $67.13, Not the $50 Estimate — and a Void Date of December 14

Payments from both Joint Juice settlements appear to have started in the middle of September. ClaimDepot’s page on the multi-state settlement, updated September 16, states: “The settlement administrator began issuing payments to approved claimants on Sept. 15, 2026.” OpenClassActions says claimants began reporting payments on September 16. Neither site is official, and the official website says nothing about payments: as of September 25 its New York FAQ still reads “There may be appeals. The appeal process can take time, perhaps more than a year. You will not receive your Cash Payment until any appeals are resolved. Please be patient.” The court record fits a September start: on July 30, 2026 Premier filed the parties’ agreement to dismiss its pending Supreme Court petition in the New York case, and the Court dismissed it on August 24 — a step the New York settlement ties to its Effective Date. BellRing Brands, Premier Nutrition’s parent, said in a quarterly filing on August 4 that it would pay the remaining $17.2 million (New York) and $68.8 million (multi-state) on or before August 10, 2026, and both agreements say payments go out after the “Effective Date” and within seven days after the pro rata calculation is finished.

How you are paid depends on what you chose. The claim form offered two boxes; the first reads “Electronic Check: Your payment will be emailed to the email address you provide in Section 1.” People paid automatically from store records get a paper check at their last known address unless they asked for an electronic check by May 18. Either way the clock is the same: the agreements bar any method “that may expire earlier than ninety (90) days of issuance,” and money from checks not cashed and eChecks not redeemed within 90 days goes back to the fund. September 15 plus 90 days is December 14, 2026 — the void date OpenClassActions quotes from a New York payment letter, 80 days from today.

The case itself is thirteen years old. The first suit, Mullins v. Premier Nutrition Corp., No. 3:13-cv-01271-RS, was filed in San Francisco federal court on March 20, 2013. The New York complaint says Premier promised that its glucosamine drink would “support and nourish cartilage, lubricate joints, and improve joint comfort” and that the six-bottle box told buyers to “drink daily for healthy, flexible joints.” New York’s Montera case went to a nine-day jury trial in 2022; the jury found violations of New York’s General Business Law and 166,249 units sold in the state, and the court entered $8,312,450 — $50 a unit — after rejecting a $91,436,950 statutory-damages demand as unconstitutionally excessive. Appeals ran to the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court and were still pending when the case settled; the settlement requires both sides to drop them. A mediator’s proposal after a June 23, 2025 session with Judge Brad Seligman led to a $90 million settlement in principle two days later. Premier denies wrongdoing and admits none.

There are two classes with two funds, and your state decided which one you are in. The New York class is “all people who purchased any Joint Juice® product in New York from December 5, 2013 to December 28, 2021, inclusive of those dates.” The multi-state class, in the words of Judge Markman’s judgment, is “All people who purchased any Joint Juice product in any of the following states and during the following Class Periods”: California from March 1, 2009, Pennsylvania from November 18, 2010, Michigan from December 12, 2010, Florida from November 18, 2012, Massachusetts from January 1, 2013, Connecticut from November 18, 2013, Illinois from November 21, 2013 and Maryland from December 12, 2013, each until December 31, 2022. Resale buyers, Premier’s officers and employees, class counsel and court staff are excluded, as are the 7 New York and 20 multi-state class members who opted out.

Inside each class are two kinds of members. “Direct Payment Class Members” were found in Costco and Amazon purchase data: 12,576 people with 45,501 units in New York and 335,768 people with 1,045,186 units in the other eight states. Starting February 3, 2026 they were sent an email or postcard listing their units and estimated payment, with a Login ID and PIN; they are paid without filing anything. Everyone else was a “Claim-In Class Member” and got nothing unless they filed by May 18. If you neither received that notice nor filed a claim, an email saying you have Joint Juice money deserves suspicion.

An emailed check is not by itself a sign of fraud; the settlement agreements provide for it, as an opt-in “eCheck.” The official site does not name the payment vendor or the sending address, so we cannot tell you what a genuine email looks like. Two rules in the agreements help: the payment method may not “carry inactivity fees,” and the administrator and its agents may deduct no fee “in connection with the disbursement, processing, or expiration of any payment instrument” without class counsel’s express written approval — an email asking you to pay something to release your money is a red flag. To check, type the site address yourself, or call JND at 1-888-921-0720 or write to info@JointJuiceSettlement.com. One commenter on Top Class Actions wrote on May 24 that they live in Illinois, filed through a link that led to the New York claim page and received a denial email; a second wrote in July that the same thing happened to them. The official site does not say whether a claim filed in the wrong settlement can be moved.

Everything is counted in “Joint Juice Units.” The agreements define a unit as “each package of the product sold at retail, including 6-packs, 24-packs, or 30-packs” and add: “A Joint Juice Unit does not refer to individual bottles or servings within a retail package.” A 30-pack is one unit, not thirty.

New York: the starting figure is $50 per unit, the same $50 the court used for the judgment. Claimants without receipts could claim up to six units — $300 at the base rate — and more with proof of purchase such as receipts, order confirmations or retailer account history. Class counsel told the court the average class member bought about 3.5 units and that $50 exceeds 550% of the $8.95 average retail price.

The other eight states: $10 per unit for the Ready-To-Drink 6-pack, Drops, Extra Strength Ready-To-Drink 6-pack and On The Go! 7-count; $25 per unit for the Ready-To-Drink 30-pack, Easy Shot and Extra Strength Easy Shot concentrates, Extra Strength Ready-To-Drink 24-pack and On The Go! 30-count. The same six-unit, no-receipt limit applied. Counsel called the $70.84 million fund more than 114% of Joint Juice retail sales to the class.

Those figures were never the final amount. The fund pays, in order, administration costs, taxes, lawyers’ fees and expenses, and service awards; what remains — the “Net Fund” — is divided among valid payments. If it falls short, every payment is cut pro rata. If it is larger, every payment is raised pro rata “up to seven (7) times the original amount”; only if money is still left would the claim deadline be reopened, announced on the home page, for people who missed it. No such notice is posted, and the reported amounts are about 1.3 to 1.4 times the base, far below seven, so by our reading there will be no second claim window. For New York, class counsel expected in March that awards would be about $50 a unit; for the eight states they told the court in April that payments were “expected to slightly increase on a pro rata basis to exhaust the fund. It appears unlikely that Cash Payments will be reduced.” Nothing returns to Premier.

The ledger below uses court-approved fund, fee, expense and award figures, JND’s sworn claim tallies and our own arithmetic, marked as such. Administration costs and taxes also come out before class members are paid, but the filings we read give no amount for them.

By our count, $34.3 million of the $90 million goes to fees, expenses and service awards and $55.7 million is left for class members and administration. The “base value on record” is JND’s tally at base rates while claims were still coming in: automatic awards of $2,275,050 plus about $3.3 million in claims in New York; $26,129,650 plus about $3.8 million in the eight states. Dividing the remainder by it gives the most the top-up could be before administration costs and later claims.

Our reading is that $402.78 is so common because six units was the most anyone could claim without receipts. The $335.65 was posted on Top Class Actions on September 19 under the words “Daughter got a check today 9.19.2026”, with the note that she lived in New York at the time; it divides into five units at exactly the same rate. The multi-state range points to a top-up of roughly 1.37×. These are inferences from claimants’ reports, not rates we found in any filing we read; the Alameda court ordered a status report “identifying the final distribution amounts” before a July 21, 2026 status conference, which we have not seen. For the automatic group, by our arithmetic, the average New York award was 3.6 units, or $180.90 at base — about $243 at $67.13. In the eight states it was 3.1 units, or $77.82; the $26,129,650 total is exactly $25 times 1,045,186 units, so every unit in the store data was valued at the higher tier.

JND must send at least one email reminder, where it has an email address, about an uncashed payment, no earlier than 30 days after issue and no later than 14 days before it expires — roughly October 15 to November 30 if payments went out September 15, by our count. Money from checks that are not cashed within 90 days, or that cannot be delivered, goes to the Rheumatology Research Foundation, the court-approved cy pres recipient, not back into a second round for class members. Judge Markman ordered that ten percent of the multi-state fee stay in trust until the distribution is finished and a final accounting is approved; in New York, class counsel must file a post-distribution accounting within 21 days after the checks go stale and the leftover is paid to the cy pres recipient. The federal docket also shows a stipulation and order dated August 25 and 27, a Ninth Circuit case number on August 28 and a Ninth Circuit order on September 9; the documents are not public on CourtListener, and we have not read them. They may be the dismissal of the two Ninth Circuit appeals the New York settlement requires (Nos. 25-1743 and 25-2133, stayed since July 2025 pending the settlement) or something else; whether any appeal is still open, we cannot say.

Nothing arrived? If you were an automatic-payment member and did not ask for an eCheck, your check goes by mail to your last known address from the store records; if you have moved, give JND your new address. If you had to file and did not, you receive nothing and are still bound by the release. Three mix-ups are easy to make. The Mullins, Sonner and Bland cases and the seven federal cases for Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania are all resolved by the one multi-state settlement. New Mexico buyers are in neither class; BellRing says a separate confidential settlement resolved that case without court approval. And this is not a Premier Protein case — it concerns only Joint Juice, which BellRing says it discontinued in the first quarter of its fiscal 2023. The administrator for both settlements is JND Legal Administration, P.O. Box 91440, Seattle, WA 98111, 1-888-921-0720, info@JointJuiceSettlement.com; class counsel are Timothy G. Blood and Thomas J. O’Reardon II of Blood Hurst & O’Reardon, LLP in San Diego.