While Parle is a household brand in India when it comes to biscuits and snack foods, Cadbury Oreo has grown in popularity over the last few years in the country, mostly due to its crazy popularity in western countries for several decades.
Now, the Delhi High Court has passed an order to stop the sales of Parle’s popular cookies Fabio or Fab!o, saying that the snack food company has infringed on the registered trademarks by passing off its cookies. This comes right as Parle remains in a tussle with Cadbury over Oreo vs Fabio.
Taking the ruling in favour of Cadbury, the Delhi High Court ordered that Parle Products Pvt Ltd has been restrained from selling its vanilla cream-filled chocolate biscuits Fabio/Fab!o because of its "resemblance and deceptive similarity" to Oreo biscuit.
What is the Oreo vs Fabio biscuit case?
Earlier, Cadbury Oreo had filed a case against Parle’s Fabio biscuit, saying that Parle had infringed on the already registered trademarks by selling its Fabio biscuit, which bears a similarity with the original vanilla-cream-filled cookies.
Passing a judgment on the case, Delhi HC Justice C Hari Shankar said that the two marks are phonetically similar. The judge said, “A consumer of average intelligence and imperfect recollection who has earlier purchased and had the Oreo cookie would when he sees the Fab!o cookie pack, be clearly likely to associate the Fab!o cookie with the Oreo cookie that he had earlier enjoyed.”
The complaint by Oreo was filed in 2020, which alleged that chocolate-vanilla cream biscuits being sold by Parle under the name Fabio or Fab!o have many similarities to the already-in-sale Oreo cookies, saying that the mark on the cookies have similarities.
Posing an argument to protect its brand, Parle said that only the letter O in Fab!o is common, it is otherwise structurally, visually, and phonetically distinct from the Oreo mark. Parle further said that the embossing on the surface of the cookie is not the same.
When the matter was presented in the court, the Delhi High Court decided to side with Cadbury Oreo over the arguments, saying that the names of the biscuits are phonetically similar, and so are the marks on the cookies.
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