Madras High Court restrains ITC from selling Sunfeast Moms Magic biscuits in blue wrapper after Britannia’s trademark suit

Madras High Court restrains ITC from selling Sunfeast Moms Magic biscuits in blue wrapper after Britannia’s trademark suit

However, it permits the company to exhaust its existing stock

The Madras High Court has restrained ITC from selling its Sunfeast Moms Magic Butter Biscuits in blue wrappers. The court noted that its packaging was deceptively like Good Day Butter Cookies of Britannia Industries, thus, it was likely to create confusion among the consumers.

A division bench of Chief Justice SV Gangapurwala and Justice D Bharatha Chakravarthy upheld the order passed last month by a single-judge bench of Justice PT Asha restraining ITC from selling biscuits in blue wrapper.

The division bench, while hearing a batch of appeals filed by ITC against the single-judge bench, has now directed ITC to change the color of the wrapper. However, it permitted the company to exhaust its existing stock of blue wrapper biscuits.

Britannia had filed a trademark infringement suit and argued that it had been using a combination of blue and yellow wrappers for its Good Day Butter Cookies since 1997. On the other hand, ITC, with dishonest intentions, started using a similar color for its butter biscuits in June this year.

Appearing for ITC, its counsel denied the claim. He contended that while in north India, the butter biscuits were sold in red wrappers, in the southern states, the company began using blue wrappers as most dairy products including butter and milk were sold in blue packaging.

He added that there were six distinct differences between the packaging used by ITC and Britannia, including the dollops of butter, photos of the biscuit and the cookie, and the font used for it.

However, the division bench held that it was not adequate to show why ITC suddenly changed the packaging from red to blue. At a casual glance, the Sunfeast and Good Day packets looked similar.

The judges held, “Even on careful consideration, it can be seen that though the brand name, trademark, device of the biscuit, and swoosh of butter is portrayed to be different, yet, it is carefully and meticulously designed and combined at an appropriate place in the wrapper to be similar than the plaintiff. Admittedly, the plaintiff is the prior user of the present color scheme, getup, combination of the picture of biscuit, butter, etc. One would be too naive to believe that this is just a coincidence.”

The bench added, “Even the way the defendant's mark, Moms Magic, which appears on both ends of the wrapper clearly resembles that of the plaintiff's depiction of its mark Good Day at the same place. Thus, even though from the picture portrayed in the paragraph, the counsel for the defendant demonstrates that each component is different; they are very similar even on a careful comparison.”

The court held, “However, the defendant is permitted to sell its products packed in offending blue color wrapper and the status of the current stock, its movement, and sale thereof shall be informed in writing and the exemption is only in respect of the current stock of the quantity of 23.7 tonnes as prayed by the senior counsel.”

Senior advocates AL Somayaji and Vijay Narayan and advocate Arun C Mohan appeared for ITC.

Senior advocates PS Raman and Satish Parasaran and advocates MS Bharath, Reshma Raj, and Preethi Jhabak along with advocate VS Krishna of Kria Law appeared for Britannia Industries.