The candy aisle just got a body count.
Mondelēz Global and Mondelēz Canada filed a seven-count complaint on 2 November 2026 in the Northern District of Illinois, No. 1:26-cv-13553, against Project 7, Inc., doing business as Joyride. The charge is simple and ugly: Joyride’s Sour Smacks sour chewy candy, launched in 2025, copies the Sour Patch Kids kid-shaped mascot, the yellow-and-green packaging, and the candy shape itself. Mondelēz wants an injunction, damages, and the dilution stopped before the lookalike hardens on the shelf.
Joyride did not start this way. In 2020 it sold Sour Fruit Gummies with packaging and designs that looked nothing like Sour Patch Kids. After a 2022 rebrand the product still failed to catch fire. Then, around April 2025—near the moment Joyride reported a $30 million equity raise that valued the company at roughly $100 million—it relaunched the line as Sour Smacks. New name. New kid mascot. New packaging in the same yellow-green palette. New candy configuration shaped like grinning people. Same retailers, often the same shelf.
The complaint paints the redesign as deliberate. Mondelēz says Joyride, a private-equity-backed company that “wasn’t making friends on its own,” stole the popular look and dared the owner to do something about it. It points to a January 2025 social-media push in which Joyride’s Chief Creative Officer Ryan Trahan (a YouTuber with more than 24 million subscribers) talked about a strategy to surpass Sour Patch Kids on Instagram and, according to the suit, admitted copying the brand’s meme format. The posts went viral. Followers poured in. Other brands noticed. Mondelēz says it asked repeatedly for the copying to stop. Joyride refused.
What the junior user stands to lose is the usual list: an injunction that can freeze sales and force a rebrand, destruction of inventory, disgorgement of profits, and the cost of rebuilding a brand that customers already mixed up with the original. Sour Patch Kids has been the kid-shaped sour candy since the 1980s. The mascot, the colors, and the shape carry decades of goodwill. A lookalike sitting next to it on the Target or Walmart shelf is not competition that starts from zero. It is feeding.
Exact copies are rare. The damage is done by the mascot cousin, the packaging that feels familiar at a glance, the one-letter shift in the story the brand tells about itself. Joyride’s earlier packaging was plainly different. The 2025 version moved the needle until Mondelēz decided the needle had gone too far.
The Window That Closes
Offices often will not stop a confusing mark on their own. Relative grounds are the owner’s problem. Opposition windows are short—typically 30 to 90 days after publication. After registration the fight gets expensive. Failure to watch lookalikes is how rights weaken: dilution, customer mix-ups, blocked expansion, a worse story at due diligence. Exact copies are rare; the real damage is one-letter shifts, phonetic twins, mascot cousins, and packaging that feels familiar at a glance. Watching the register is cheaper than a roadside rebrand.
The work of watching a mark is what makes the short window usable. Why monitoring exists is the practical answer to a system that publishes and then waits for the owner to notice. What happens if you wait is already written in the aisle: the junior product is on the shelf, the funding round is closed, and the only remaining cheap moment has passed.
The sour-then-sweet kid was already someone else’s problem before it became Joyride’s. The only cheap moment is before the lookalike hardens.