3 Steps to Protecting Your Food & Drink Brand

The Food & Drink Sector has contributes an estimate £28bn to the UK economy, growing by 2.3% on the previous year. Figures show it accounts for 20% of all UK manufacturing, making it the largest sector in the UK. With the volume of new food brands being launched every year to compete in this highly valued market, it is essential to have your brand protected. The amount of competitors with similar target markets and brand approach mean that protecting your brand’s intellectual property rights such as brand design and recipe are more important than ever in order to be seen as a distinguishable brand from the rest. In this article, we break down some of the most important items to consider for your food brand.  

1. Protecting Your Recipe   

If your business has put in research & development to create its own recipe, it’s essential to ensure its protected. There are a number of ways to protect a recipe for a new product. One example is signature dishes/recipes.  It’s often thought that due to the fact most recipes are created from previous renditions, it’s not possible to trademark it. However, copyright doesn’t require a recipe to be fully original. For example, if your product’s recipe is a more or less a standard rendition of a millionaire’s shortbread, copyright may not be in your favor. However, if your business takes a traditional recipe as a starting base but spends time in development in order to create something original and enough of a deviation from the beginning recipe, this could be seen as original enough to be protected.   

2. Patenting Your Process 

If your product recipes require use of a certain inventive process in order to create the final result, this process as well could be protected. Depending on the particular development & tools used to create the recipe, this could be classified separately to the recipe as its own invention. For example, if you have invented a brand new way of cooking or baking a certain product, this could be patented if it’s something entirely new to the market and is already not used by other businesses. This is important to note if one of your brand’s unique selling points to key stakeholders or consumers is the process in which it is made.   

3. Brand Protection 

Your brand’s look is as essential to protect as your recipe. When consumers come across your brand, whether that be on shelves or on-line, their first impression of your product is the design on the packaging or your website. A brand designed is defined as  “the appearance of the whole or part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture or materials of the product or ornamentation”. As with other aspects of brand protection, this brand design must not resemble anything that’s already in the public domain. In the UK, you can register a design up to 12 months after it was released, so it’s essential for this to one of the first steps you can take prior to or post-launch.  

According to the UK’s registered design rights law, “In the UK a registered design is protected for up to 25 years provided that the protection being renewed every five years.” 

Registered design rights protect the complete appearance of a product including its physical shape, colours, materials, texture and lines. Unregistered design rights on the other hand, protect products and are automatically enforced if a design is completely original and non-commonplace.   

The appearance of a product is protected in the UK for 3 years from the date you make your design public. This is known as ‘supplementary unregistered design right’ (or ‘continuing unregistered community design’ if you made your design public in the UK or the EU before 1 January 2021). 

 The appearance of a product can be 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional and includes its: 

• shape 
• colours 
• texture 

• materials 
• ornamentation 

To learn more about how to protect your brand in the UK, visit the official UK Government’s section on intellectual property rights.