A British food store in New Zealand has won the right to continue selling Weetabix – though a legal battle with a rival cereal brand means its label must be covered up.
Expat shop A Little Bit Of Britain, which has three stores, was taken to court by food company Sanitarium after it attempted to import boxes of Weetabix cereal from the UK last year.
The Australian cereal giant argued the product infringed its Weet-Bix trademark and had the shipment of 360 Weetabix boxes stopped by customs.
A High Court decision on Tuesday declared there was no chance of customers being misled, given the British product is only on sale at speciality goods stores.
However, Justice Gendall did find importing the item with a similar name breached the Trade Marks Act and ordered the store to cover up the Weetabix label for future sales, RNZ reported.
Store owner Lisa Wilson told the station she was expecting a surge in demand after her customers were deprived of their breakfast staple for 18 months.
She said: “Normally we sell a pallet a month and I thought ‘crikey, we might need to get two or three just for the first month [to] clear the backlog’, but I’m sure with it being gone for a year and a half that it is definitely going to be the bestseller for the next while anyway.”
New Zealand’s Stuff website said the judge ordered that the seized cereal was now past its sell-by date and would have to be destroyed.
Wilson said although she was “grumpy” about the destruction of the cereal, she was pleased she would be able to restock it, albeit with labels covering the brand name.
In a Facebook post Wilson announced: “You can be assured we will be getting Weetabix in our next container. As per the judge’s ruling, we have to sticker over the Weetabix logo so please help us out and let us know below what you think we should call it.
“We are thinking ‘confuse a Brit’ since they think we are so easily led astray.”