For the past couple years, General Mills has battled to register a yellow color mark in connection with its Cheerios® breakfast cereal.  More specifically, back in 2015, General Mills applied to register (Serial No. 86757390) the mark shown below, described as “the color yellow appearing as the predominant uniform background color on product packaging

– Jason Voiovich, Vice President, Marketing, Logic PD

It’s a classic of 1970s dystopian cinema. In “Soylent Green”, Charlton Heston (yep, the very same) struggles through a horrible vision of an overpopulated future where human beings are processed into “Soylent Green” to feed the populace. (The meme-line from this entire movie comes at

Brace yourselves everybody, I have some bad news: Hamburger Helper is no more. But wait! Don’t jump yet, friend. Thanks to the General Mills marketing department, and fueled by a loss of market share to new competition from Kraft, Hamburger Helper has been reborn. Let me introduce to the new and improved brand: Helper

         

They say that the best defense is a good offense. It appears that General Mills has adopted this strategy in a recent trademark dispute over the term LOADED in connection with instant potatoes.

Just yesterday, the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal reported the filing of a federal district court lawsuit by General Mills against Idahoan Foods, in which