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
General Mills
Beer for Breakfast: Lessons in Co-Branding from General Mills
Yesterday General Mills announced that it had partnered with Fulton Brewery to create HefeWheaties: a limited edition brew. The beer is a Hefeweizen, which is traditionally a wheat-based beer, making it a perfect canvas for the Wheaties brand.
Normally when these situations arise, it is because one party is complaining (For example, Lucasfilms’ objection to…
Just because you can name your meal replacement product “Soylent”, doesn’t mean you should
– 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…
This Ain’t Your Dad’s Hamburger Helper…
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. …
New Cheerios Billboards: Keeping it Simple
–Catlan McCurdy, Attorney
Driving down the highway the other day, I spotted a new billboard. There were no brand names associated with the ad, and the entire sign consisted of only a single word: Love. And yet, I instantly understood the connection: Cheerios.
Thanks to blog.livlane.com for capturing General Mills’ newest…
A Rose by Any Other Name
—Brent Carlson-Lee, Founder & Owner of Eli’s Donut Burgers
I have to admit Beef Products Inc.’s “lean, finely textured beef” sounds pretty good. But call it “pink slime” (its recently popularized nickname) and I find it much less appetizing. In their defense, pink slime is 100% beef…except for the ammonia. And beef without ammonia is…
That Purple Cereal
–Susan Perera, Attorney
As you likely know, many of the Duets Blog bloggers were involved in a full day trademark CLE last week. One of the sessions focused on the issues facing private label brands and the line between identifying your competitor by using similar packaging and infringing on their trademark or trade dress.
Along…
Get a Load of This: General Mills Takes Offense in Trademark Spat Over Spuds
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…
Taking the Cake With Suggestive Trademarks?
John Reinan provided yesterday a marketer’s perspective that questioned the value of coined trademarks. In my experience, as a trademark type, one place on the spectrum of distinctiveness where both trademark and marketing types can have their cake and eat it too, is the delicious category of suggestive trademarks.
From the legal side of the coin…