Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC v. Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. - 735 F.3rd 735 (7th Cir. 2013)

Rule:

A trademark's value is the saving in search costs made possible by the information that the trademark conveys about the quality of the trademark owner's brand. The brand's reputation for quality depends on the owner's expenditures on product quality and quality control, service, advertising, and so on. Once the reputation is created, the firm will obtain greater profits because repeat purchases and word-of-mouth endorsements will add to sales and because consumers will be willing to pay a higher price in exchange for a savings in search costs and an assurance of consistent quality. These benefits depend on the firm's ability to maintain that consistent quality. When a brand's quality is inconsistent, consumers learn that the trademark does not enable them to predict their future consumption experiences from their past ones. The trademark does not then reduce their search costs. They become unwilling to pay more for the branded than for the unbranded good, and so the firm no longer earns a sufficient return on its expenditures on promoting the trademark to justify them.

Facts:

Kraft Foods (“Kraft”) was a well-known manufacturer of food products sold in grocery stores. Its products included a wide variety of packaged cheeses, a number of them sold under the trademarked "Cracker Barrel" label. Kraft has been selling cheese in grocery stores under that name for more than half a century. Thousands of grocery stores carry Kraft cheeses bearing that label. Kraft does not sell any non-cheese products under the name Cracker Barrel. On the other hand, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store (“CBOCS”) was a well-known chain of low-price restaurants (it opened its first restaurant in 1969), 620 in number at last count, many of them just off major highways. Upon learning recently that CBOCS planned to sell a variety of food products (not including cheese, however), such as packaged hams, in grocery stores under its logo, "Cracker Barrel Old Country Store" (the last three words are in smaller type in the logo), Kraft filed this suit. It claimed that when CBOCS sells its food products in grocery stores, many consumers will be confused by the similarity of the logos and think that food products so labeled are Kraft products, with the result that if they are dissatisfied with a CBOCS product they will blame Kraft. The district judge found the likelihood of confusion, and of resulting harm to Kraft, from CBOCS's selling through such outlets sufficient to warrant the grant of a preliminary injunction.

Issue:

Are Kraft’s and CBOCS’s product labels similar enough to increase the likelihood of consumer confusion?

Answer:

Yes.

Conclusion:

It was not the fact that the parties' trade names are so similar that was decisive, nor even the fact that the products are similar (low-cost packaged food items). It was those similarities coupled with the fact that, if CBOCS prevails in this suit, similar products with confusingly similar trade names will be sold through the same distribution channel—grocery stores, and often the same grocery stores—and advertised together. (In the brief period before the preliminary injunction was issued, in which CBOCS hams were sold in grocery stores, an online ad for Cracker Barrel Sliced Spiral Ham by a coupons firm provided a link to a coupon for Kraft's Cracker Barrel cheeses.) The competing products would also be likely to appear in the same store circulars. Such similarities and overlap would increase the likelihood of consumer confusion detrimental to Kraft. The particular danger for Kraft of CBOCS's being allowed to sell food products through the same outlets under a trade name confusingly similar to Kraft's "Cracker Barrel" trade name is that if CBOCS's products are inferior in any respect to what the consumer expects—if a consumer has a bad experience with a CBOCS product and blames Kraft, thinking it the producer—Kraft's sales of Cracker Barrel cheeses are likely to decline; for a consumer who thinks Kraft makes bad hams may decide it probably makes bad cheeses as well.