Intellectual Property
Food is food and farming is farming, right? I mean, humans have been engaging in agriculture for close to 15,000 years. And we’ve been hunter-gatherers for 99% of this genetic iteration as Homo Sapiens for 2 million years. But somewhere we became obsessed with names and naming things we considered ours. We became cognizant of ownership, protecting our good name and the authenticity of the goods we offered.
One of my most disliked tasks while working in the tech industry was naming products. Software, hardware, services—it didn’t matter, it was all hands on deck for throwing spaghetti at the white board while an attorney had the final thumbs up or down to each suggestion. Now, we just feed the parameters of our customer demographic into an AI chat bot and it spits out what’s legally acceptable and what isn’t.
There’s been a lot of brouhaha in the food industry of late over names and swiping formulations and packaging of popular items.
The culinary community dragged David Chang after his heavy-handed cease & desists orders to mom & pop shops over his chili/chile crunch trademarks until he admitted defeat. If you’ve got to have the chili crunch, Momofuku’s mail order will happily ship a three-pack. But I’ve been eating this spicy condiment at my Asian and Pacific Islander friends’ tables since Chang was in nappies with the spicy condiment’s origin far predating Chang’s corporate holdings by centuries.
The really audacious ones, though, steal the product outright, producing a similar item and privately labeling under an established brand. Yeah, Trader Joe’s, I’m talking about you. As beloved as this grocery chain has become, it’s notorious for courting small producers only to copy the item right down to the label’s artwork and then mass produce it as cheaply as possible.
You might think these things don’t happen at the farmers market, but they do in an assortment of ways. Modern metropolitan markets have morphed over the years from being a producer only model to amazing incubators for small businesses who, through lots of hard work, sometimes turn into widely distributed products. Nothing warms my heart more than shopping in a grocery store or cooperative and seeing the products of a fellow vendor from a market I did years ago with them and think about all the slow days I got sent home with lots of their unsold products and say to myself, “What a luxury!” Even today I spy current fellow vendors’ products outside the markets and cheer them on.
Product scouts and distributors regularly prowl the isles at weekly markets taking close note as to who sells what. The absolute worst are markets trying to poach vendors from competing markets. Try that today and you will most likely end up in court and on the losing side.
In my early days of going to market another producer swiped one of my popular product ideas and then sold it for less at the exact same market! Incensed, I vented to a friend who is a very accomplished glass blower. He told me that people copy his signature designs all the time and went on to explain that when others copy you it simply means you’re doing a great job. The copycat, however, doesn’t have the capacity to create, let alone birth an idea into reality. And then he added the secret sauce—after being copied, moving on with new and better ideas is the true reward.
A word of advice: when you encounter a situation such as these, always go with the original if you want the best.