As a series snack food entrepreneur, Warren Wilson is no stranger to the challenges of running a business.
In the early days of his first business, selling funnel cakes at fairs, there was the moment when, tired of wasting money on bad weather days, he bought a weather insurance – and began to lose money more than he had when it rained. In the 1990s, he and his wife and business partner, Sara, once had to mortgage their house and sell investments to pay their business.
But it still came as a little shock when Wilson did what they thought was a routine move to register the trademark of their hot product – a snack dish called Pretzel Pretzel Chips – and it was contested by none other than Frito-Lay, the 800 pound gorilla in the snack food market owned by PepsiCo.
“It’s so different from anything we met because we are not fighting product in the supermarket, we are not fighting against an institution like a bank, we are not dealing with an act of nature,” Mr. Wilson said in an interview at the headquarters of his company here. “This fight is about a big company that wants to dominate the category of snack foods by crushing a small company like ours rather than competition with us.”
Frito-Lay, whose products Rold Gold pretzels and Stacy Pita Chips rival Pretzel Chips, declined to discuss the matter, citing the ongoing dispute with the company’s Wilson, “Princeton Vanguard.
But in its filings with the Patent and Trademark Office, Frito-Lay says Pretzel Chips can not be registered as a trademark because it is a generic term. “Like” milk chocolate bar, “the combination of” pretzel “and net gains of no meaning as a sentence beyond the generic meaning of its constituent elements,” the company wrote in a 2010 movement .
The dispute is still pending with the board of First Instance in the office of the brand.
Brands, which are names or symbols associated with a specific company or product, can be extremely useful to companies building a brand. Think of the tissues of Kimberly-Clark Kleenex facial or logo of Nike swoosh.
Brand experts and lawyers say the brand value of simple easily understood brand names has intensified in the Internet age, because consumers are more likely to find such products while doing web searches.
“You prefer to have a name like Moviefone as a Fandango, because that is what someone is going to plug into a search engine, but no doubt you will be challenged,” said Allen P. Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates, a design firm brand.
With so much at stake, companies are much more likely to fight for trademark rights. For example, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are experiencing conflict on the term “App Store” for software applications from Apple, which moved to brand in 2008.
For small businesses, the cost of fighting a battle against brand can go beyond dollars and cents.
“Large companies will do the hard up their competitors,” said Barton Beebe, a professor at New York University School of Law who specializes in intellectual property law. “If they can not win on the market, they try to soften them with legal fees and distracting. Even if they lose the case, it is a Pyrrhic victory because the small business has lost so many resources. “
For Pretzel Chips, Princeton Vanguard has already spent $ 1 million in legal fees, the hiring of David H. Bernstein and Joe DiSalvo, who won control of Glaceau Vitaminwater name, which is now owned by Coca-Cola.
Trademark lawyers say it is unclear how strongly advocated by Wilsons have term pretzel chips, even if they were using it for their snack first went on sale in 2004.
