Three logos are two too many

Regional products are your trump cards. If your products are from a well-known region you can market them better and they also obtain higher profits. But if you have made a name for yourself nationally or even internationally there will also be a lot of people copying your idea to cash in. They then ruin the prices with bad quality products. A registered trade mark can protect you from this. When it comes to farm produce you don’t have to wait long for regulations from the EU. In Brussels they even have created three logos for protected product names. But how are products like Altenburger goats cheese, Thuringian bratwurst and Spreewald gerkins protected and what requirements do the products have to fulfil?

Two variations of the EU logo show where the product comes from. Products given the protected place of origin logo have to comply with the strictest of rules. The products have to come from, be processed and produced by a special accepted and defined method. One of the only 30 German products with this logo is the Altenburger goats cheese. The majority of products with this logo are made up of 24 mineral water producers, three cheese specialists and two fresh meat brands. In May 2010 the red and yellow logo will replace the blue and yellow variation of the logo with the same text. This is because it is often mistaken for the “weaker” logo for protected geographical in formation.

The blue and yellow logo with the hills in the middle is the logo for protected geographical information. To be able to use this logo the product only needs to comply with one of the rules (i.e. produced or processed in a particular region). Procedures and recipes are not dictated and therefore don’t have to be stated. Thuringian bratwurst and Spreewald gerkins are two of the products which carry this logo.There is a greater variety in the 38 products which carry this logo like bakery products, meat products and quite a few beer labels.

There are no German products with this label, which is called guaranteed traditional speciality. This logo identifies products which are traditionally made or have traditional ingredients instead of specifying an area where a product comes from. A good example for these products is mozzarella cheese. This cheese can even be made from Danish milk in large-scale manufacturing.

Critics blame the EU logos for not being very meaningful. The German association for consumer advice says the “weaker” ones – “protected geographical information” and “guaranteed traditional speciality” are especially confusing for consumers. These names would lead the consumer to believe that the product comes from a specific region but this is often not the case. Only the red label means what it says. Are those labels viable for regional marketing of products is the question as even big names struggle to provide products that hold what their name promises – like Cognac, Champagne and Prosecco.

If you still want to know which products are currently trying to gain an EU label you can look at the DOOR database for protected product names. In this database you can also find all previous registered products including the full application forms and connected publications for free. At the moment there are 911 products listed in DOOR (479 protected place of origin, 407 protected geographical information and 25 guaranteed traditional specialties).

You should definitely employ a trade law solicitor if you want to register your product for a national or EU trademark. Only a trained solicitor can give you details about the costs involved. The official charges alone can easily reach thousands of Euro. But even higher costs will be incurred for trademark law infringement. Civil and criminal charges can follow.