The peaks were never just chocolate. They were a silhouette the public already knew by sight, a prism that had owned the shelf since 1929. This month Mondelēz, the group behind Toblerone, Cadbury and Côte d’Or, walked into the High Court in London and named Catherine’s Originals Ltd as the party that had borrowed it.
The product is the O’bar: a 200-gram plant-based bar sold from Walberton in Sussex for £9.20 in milk or plain, up to £10.55 for pumpkin spice or cinnamon swirl. It is broken into segments that rise in rounded, semi-oval humps. Mondelēz says that shape is too close to the triangular prism that has defined Toblerone for nearly a century. The claim is trademark infringement and passing off. A public case index records the matter as open, filed mid-October, with Kraft Foods Schweiz Holding GmbH on one side and the Sussex company on the other.
Catherine Dodd founded the business in 2021 while she was still a teenager. The company employs about ten people. Accounts showed roughly £105,000 in the bank at the end of last year. She sells through markets, online orders and subscriptions. She says the humps are an O for Originals, part of a small chocolate world that also includes Milky O’s pralines. “We strongly disagree with the claim concerning O’bar and are working with our legal team to defend our position,” she told The Guardian. “Honestly, it’s fairly frightening for a small business we’ve put so much care and hard work into building.” Her legal adviser added that the bar has its own distinctive design and identity.
Mondelēz was not new to this fight. In 2017 it warned Poundland off the Twin Peaks bar, which carried two humps instead of one. The launch was delayed. The bar only returned after the packaging colour and the shape itself were changed. It is still on sale. This time the company says it spent several months trying to resolve the matter directly and could not. “The iconic Toblerone shape is one of the most recognised and distinctive product designs in the UK and across the world, and has been a hallmark of the brand since 1929,” a spokesperson said. “We have a responsibility to protect our trademarks and intellectual property, which we take seriously.”
A standard milk Toblerone still costs about £2.50. The junior user is selling a premium vegan version at more than three times the price. The distance in price does not erase the silhouette. Customers who already know the mountain do not need a name on the wrapper to feel the echo. That is the goodwill the claim is built on.
What the junior user stands to lose is the ordinary price of a shape fight: an injunction that stops the bar, the cost of redesigning moulds and packaging, stock that can no longer be sold, and a rebrand that has to be explained to every subscriber who already ordered the original. For a ten-person business that still has the look of a startup, that bill arrives before any judgment on the merits.
The window that was already closed
Offices do not stop a confusing mark on their own. Relative grounds are the owner’s problem. Opposition windows are short, typically thirty to ninety 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 when someone later asks about the brand in due diligence.
Exact copies are rare. The real damage is the one-letter shift, the phonetic twin, the mascot cousin, and the packaging that feels familiar at a glance. A rounded hump is not a triangle, yet it is close enough that a giant with a ninety-year shape mark will spend months and then court time to keep the mountain clear. Watching the register is cheaper than a roadside rebrand.
That is why monitoring exists. It is the work of watching a mark before the lookalike hardens. The O for Originals was already someone else’s silhouette before it became a High Court problem. The only cheap moment is before the peaks are challenged.
Source: The Guardian