I never gave much thought to peanut butter jar lids. They’re kind of like my shoe laces or coffee cup. Things I use, but don’t mean very much. But now, I know I was wrong. Dead wrong. Because Skippy and Jif are locked in a multi-million dollar life-and-death struggle not over peanut butter, or advertising, but over the color of the lids on their jars. This war includes threats and counter-threats, armies of high-priced lawyers, Federal Courthouses and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. But, this is just what’s on the surface.
The food business is a lot like turf wars between rival street gangs. Each food company has its own turf that it guards jealously against invaders. Set foot on the rival gang’s turf, and your foot is likely to get chopped off – – or worse. In this case, the street gangs are real heavyweights: Skippy, owned by Hormel ($9 billion total annual sales); Jif, owned by Smuckers ($7.8 billion).
The turf: no-sugar-added peanut butter – – worth billions.
Jif is the #1 brand of peanut butter (30% of total market); Skippy is #2 (10% of total market). Things were fine, each gang keeping to its own turf, until Jif decided to introduce “Jif No Added Sugar” and invade the sugar-free turf where Skippy is king. All’s fair in love and turf wars, and Skippy needed some serious push-back to protect itself in the ‘hood. What to do? Although peanut butter is pretty much all the same, not all jar lids are created equal. When advanced advertising showed “Jif No Added Sugar” with light blue lids, Skippy pounced – – telling Jif it couldn’t sell the product because the light blue lids infringed (i.e., invaded the turf of) Skippy’s light blue lidded peanut butter. Skippy claims that consumers will be confused if two brands of peanut butter have light blue lids. I guess Skippy believes we consumers are too stupid to read the words “JIF” and “SKIPPY” in huge letters on the front of the jar.
Also, Skippy’s case has other problems, because Skippy actually uses blue, light blue, light orange and brown lids. Also, other companies have used similar colors for years, and I’ve never heard reports of anyone not understanding what they were buying. [Hey Ethel, is this peanut butter or canned tuna?] But, let’s not get distracted by the facts. Skippy decided to file an application in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register blue peanut butter lids as its intellectual property. Jif retaliated by suing Skippy in Federal Court for trying to interfere with its new no-added-sugar product. And now, it’s game on.
The Food Lawyers® take: I know from thirty years of practicing law in the food space that the industry has an underbelly of price fixing, crushing newcomers, making secret deals and other take-no-prisoner strategies. But they don’t often come out into the sunshine like the Jif-Skippy turf war. The public would be better off if these companies competed through better products and better pricing. But that’s not the way it works. So, we’ll sit back and watch the gangs throw haymakers at each other until someone goes down and the turf lines are redrawn. And then we’ll wait until the next time someone steps on someone else’s turf.