GUARDING YOUR IP IN THE FOOD INDUSTRY By Stephanie Hadley Christchurch-based Original Foods Baking Company MAKE SURE YOU GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR FOOD. In the food and beverage business, identifying and controlling your competitive edge is the secret ingredient for success. At James & Wells, we have an entire team dedicated to the cause. We can help you own and leverage your innovative brands and ideas, facilitate business opportunities and ensure your labelling is compliant. www.foodtechnology.co.nz 15 LEVERAGING KIWI KNOW-HOW JAWS.CO.NZ USA Australia Indonesia Canada Korea China Taiwan Japan Hong Kong JWS/PR/0035A has been cooking up innovative treats for local and global customers for more than 25 years, so knows what it takes to become established and prosper in the food and beverage (F&B) sector. Company director Jane Mayell is happy to share the survival lessons learned from a quarter century in the commercial kitchen and, in particular, how the company ensured its brand and recipes were protected. Mayell says making a living from baking – if you love doing it – may sound like a dream job and a straightforward proposition: bake delicious food ‘and they will come’. But she cautions that the F&B game is an intensely competitive one, particularly if you’re making foods for sale in outlets other than your own café or restaurant. Go commercial, with sales and distribution to a host of different outlets and vendors here and overseas, and the competition gets intense. More importantly, especially in the overseas context, the notion of ‘fair play’ no longer holds true, Mayell says. “Competitors will steal your intellectual property – if they can get away with it. Which they can, and will, if you don’t take the necessary action to protect your innovations.” Original Foods had the foresight to do just that when it launched in 1991, taking steps to shore up its IP and staying vigilant since then. It may surprise people to know that the F&B game is full of IP assets that need to be protected: recipes, product brand names and trademarks, production, packaging, marketing and distribution processes, supplier and customer lists, and costings and finances in general. In the hands of a competitor, those assets will boost their business and erode yours. They are valuable properties and worth protecting fiercely. You also need to know that you’re not impinging on someone else’s IP when developing new products and trademarks. In the early stages of developing a trademark it’s prudent to carry out a search to ensure your design isn’t confusingly similar to something that already exists. It’s pointless - and financially wasteful - designing and launching a new product if you subsequently have to withdraw it from the market. Trademarks should be unique; Original Foods is even scrupulous in not using standard or popular fonts for its brand names or the company’s name. IP protection is not a one-off exercise either. Original Foods gets our firm to monitor six-monthly for any trade mark violations of its brands, and from time to time it’s had to notify companies that they are impinging on the company’s trademarks and ask them to rebrand their products. It’s keen to pick that up at an early stage for the sake of both parties, to save potential pain and cost. IP protection does come with a cost but Mayell believes companies can’t afford not to protect their IP, and should include the costs in their budget as a discrete operational expense. Mayell says in hindsight her one regret from an IP perspective was not securing the company’s domain names in the early stages - to save money. The risk in not doing so is that there are operators out there who register hundreds of domain names willy-nilly…and they may be locking up your one. IP protection is important to business survival but it’s not the only F&B business consideration to keep a close eye on. Food safety is critical, and meeting food safety compliance, and health and safety requirements in the workplace calls for robust staff training and the keeping of accurate daily records. Other key areas for the foodie entrepreneur to consider are the quality of ingredients and the freshness of the end-products – especially with baked goods. Original Foods’ goal has always been to make products with a taste that is as close as possible to home-baked goods, for which it uses real New Zealand ingredients and suppliers wherever possible. Mayell also recommends looking ahead all the time, researching and learning from market trends and adapting quickly to food legislation changes. But innovation is paramount, she says. That calls for constant improvement, from developing new recipes to ongoing training, and refining and improving production processes. “The day you stop doing that is the day your competitor will start to gain an edge on you.” Stephanie Hadley is a solicitor and brand strategist with national intellectual property law experts James & Wells, based in Christchurch and specialising in the food & beverage sector.
FT-Annual Directory 2018-eMag
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