Cadbury Wins Trademark Battle against Chinese Confectionary-Manufacturer

Since early ages, people all around the world are extremely fond of sweet treats be it candies like gummy bears, sour punk and most favourably, chocolate. When it comes to chocolate, we never fail to draw our attention towards the globally renowned and everyone’s favourite Chocolate Bar manufacturing giant, Cadbury.

Cadbury UK Ltd. is a British multinational confectionery brand founded by Mr John Cadbury at Birmingham, Warwickshire in England. This confectionery brand is owned by Mondelez International and has been inevitably spreading its wings since the year 1824. This 195-year-old confectionery giant is under the chairmanship of Irene Blecker Rosenfeld and is headquartered at Uxbridge, London. Cadbury has gained world-wide loyalty and popularity for its chocolate bar brands like Dairy Milk, Crunchie, Fudge, Bournville, Crackle etc. In addition, it manufactures several other types of brands including, Eclairs, Trident Gum, Bytes and Curly Wurly as well. In the year 2009, this candy giant succeeded in becoming one of the top-selling confectionery manufacturers on the launch of Dairy Milk Silk.

In the previous years, there have been multiple cases where Cadbury had been attacked by competing confectionery manufacturers for launching a similar or identical product or any product with identical or similar packaging. Once again, this year, Cadbury became a victim of infringement as ruled out by the Beijing Haidan District People’s Court. It was observed that a Chinese Confectionary company named, Yikoulian (Xiamen) Food Co. Ltd. headquartered at Xiamen, was using Cadbury trademarks on its products.

Yikoulian (Xiamen) Food Co. Ltd. was founded in the year 1985 and registered the trademark “怡口莲” which means “Delicious Lotus” in the year 2012. It has been using the registered trademark on rice-based chocolate bars as well as other confectionery products and food items.

As a result of this infringement, the deciding court concluded that the use of similar trademark and packaging by the Chinese company is carried out with an intention to confuse and mislead the buyers as well as to cause damage to the reputation and goodwill of Cadbury. Moreover, the products of both the brands were sold alongside in the supermarkets resulting in a deceptive presumption in the mind of distributors and customers that the two brands are associated with each other. Finally, this week, the court ordered the Chinese brand to cease production, sales and promotion of the counterfeit trademark and products and to pay damages amounting to a whopping amount of 2.43 million Yuan, in favour of UK Confectionary giant.

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