Protecting Your Food and Drink Packaging

Why Protect Packaging?

For food and drink brands, packaging isn’t just practical. Most purchasing decisions are made at a glance, especially by passive shoppers browsing crowded shelves. In such a competitive market, distinctive packaging helps your product stand out.

The rise of “dupe culture” has made this even more important. Copycat products that imitate the look of established brands can mislead consumers and erode brand value. Discount retailers and others may style their products to mimic yours, hoping to benefit from your reputation. That’s why it’s vital to understand how to protect, enforce, and strengthen your intellectual property rights.

From confectionery to energy drinks, consumers typically don’t spend much time researching before buying. Their choices are often driven by packaging design.

Protecting your packaging with the right IP tools helps stop competitors from exploiting the brand recognition you’ve worked hard to build.

Can I Register Designs for Food and Drink Products?

Not for the products themselves – but often, you can register designs for the packaging.

A registered design protects the visual appearance of a product: its shape, patterns, and ornamentation. You can register both 3D (e.g. unique bottle shapes) and 2D (e.g. graphic designs or labels) elements.

To qualify, the design must be:

• New – it can’t be identical to something already made public.
• Possess individual character – it must create a different overall impression from existing designs.
• Not purely functional – features that exist only to achieve a technical result aren’t eligible.

Registered design protection is a cost-effective way to safeguard packaging aesthetics. It’s particularly useful in the food and drink sector, where visual appeal drives sales. By registering your design, you can stop others from using packaging that creates a similar overall impression.

Can I Register Trade Marks for My Products?

Yes. While you can’t trade mark the food or drink itself, you can register trade marks for your brand identifiers – such as logos, product names, taglines, and in certain circumstances even distinctive packaging shapes or colours.

Trade marks protect signs that distinguish your goods from those of others. Unlike design rights, which cover how something looks, trade marks protect what something signifies – its identity and source.

To register a trade mark, it must:

• Be distinctive – capable of identifying your product as coming from you.
• Avoid conflict – it must not be too similar to existing marks or be overly descriptive.

The advantages? Trade marks can last indefinitely, as long as they’re renewed every 10 years. There’s also no time limit on when you can file, unlike registered designs. This makes trade marks a powerful tool for long-term brand protection and enforcement.

Ready to Protect Your Packaging?

In the food and drink industry, your packaging is a powerful asset. Protecting it helps maintain your brand’s position, fend off imitations, and preserve consumer trust.

• Registered designs protect how your packaging looks.
• Trade marks protect what your packaging stands for.

It’s never too early to start building an IP strategy. Most successful brands treat IP as an evolving portfolio – adding and reviewing rights as their products and identity grow.

Get in touch to discuss how to protect your food or drink products effectively.