The D’Andrea brothers created a healthier, trans-fat free energy bar for the troops, as an official R&D partner of the DoD Combat Feeding Program at Natick (where we paid for and conducted the R&D).  When the military feeding bureaucrats sabotaged those efforts and blocked the healthier bar from ever reaching the troops in rations, the D’Andrea brothers sued the civilian-run bureaucracy at Natick Soldier Center and won.

A short (but dramatic) history of the lawsuit

2. Our new bar won multiple military Army-conducted lab tests and Soldier field tests of energy bars.  SoldierFuel was also recommended by the nutritionists who put together the Special Operations Forces Nutrition Guide.

1. We created a new SoldierFuel energy bar for Soldiers that was all-natural, had a performance formula that delivered steady energy, and was free of trans fat. 

3. Genuine military nutritionists (i.e. those who are actually serving, in uniform) were on our side, and wanted our healthier trans-fat free bar to get to their fellow men and women in the Armed Services. 

5. Natick’s Stephen Moody then wrote some emails which essentially became smoking guns #1 and #2, part of the evidence which led to the Court of Federal Claims finding Moody and Natick guilty of material breach and undermining our efforts. 

Moody alleged our trans-fat free bar was not viable and the evidence he provided was willfully false (and exposed as such in the lawsuit during his cross-examination): he said our bar had never been evaluated (when in fact his own Natick and RDECOM labs had run at least two Tech Evals and field tests specifically evaluating performance) and then advised “caveat emptor” regarding us and our bar, which was evidence of the military-wide blackballing that Moody and his friends had initiated.

Here are results from an energy bar evaluation conducted by Natick Soldier Center (Alan Wright, Research Food Tech, Natick Soldier RDECOM), where 52 Soldiers at Fort Polk evaluated bars based on their performance.

4. When it became clear that troops weren’t being provided our new trans-fat free energy bar in rations, and instead were still being supplied trans fat products, the concerned uniformed military nutritionists (like Dr. Johnston, who is a Lt. Col in the Army, as well as an M.D.) began to ask the civilian military feeding bureaucrats why they were dropping the ball and/or stonewalling.

Then Natick’s Stephen Moody went further and actually defended his policy of putting trans fat in troop food.

6. Natick Soldier Center bureaucrats ramped up their campaign of slander.  Natick Combat Feeding bosses rallied the bureacratic community to try and shut us down.  Gerald Darsch went so far as to specify that he wanted to “turn off” the Army Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (“USUHS”, a place with actual military M.D.’s and accredited dieticians) which was asking pointed questions about why Natick was still supplying a trans fat bar to troops.  This was smoking gun #3 in our lawsuit.  A key proof that the Natick Soldier Center sabotaged us.

7. Whenever someone in the world of military feeding started to ask questions about why our efforts to remove trans fat were being shut down, Moody and his team would prevent those people from talking to us and learning more.  And if someone raised their voice on behalf of our efforts to remove trans fat and get a healthier non-trans-fat bar into troop rations, Moody slammed them and did his best to poison the well against them.

8. We repeatedly asked for a meeting, to try and clear the air.  Finally, Natick agreed to have one.  At the Natick Soldier Center.  So we went.  [Note: at that point, late 2007, we hadn’t discovered many of the above emails, so we didn’t know precisely how bad things were.]   When Paul D’Andrea got to the meeting, he found himself confronted with dozens of Natick Combat Feeding and RDECOM staff, as well as a small army of lawyers who were taking notes on every word he said, and a battery of stenographers (like Kathy Evangelos) who took dictation and glared at him in a manner that they apparently considered fierce.  Afterward, we discovered emails revealing Natick’s efforts (through Kathy Evangelos) to “tweak” and “clean up” the record of that meeting, so that the message and facts could be doctored.  And then we discovered all the other smoking gun emails (including those in #’s 1-7, above) and realized Natick was flat-out sabotaging us.  So we brought a lawsuit, which we eventually won (after five years).

From a Kathy Evangelos email:

An in this one, Moody damned Dr. Patty Deuster (a Ph.D), called her claims “BS”, and slammed the Special Operations Forces leadership as “lacking discipline.”