Trademark crowdsourcing: restaurant and food service registered trademarks with overlapping names

In a recent filing with the USPTO, our firm provided a listing of more than than 25 pairings or groupings of trademarks registered by different owners in connection with restaurant, café, and other similar food services, where each pair or group features the same dominant term plus additional descriptive or generic wording. See below for the full USPTO response via Scribd.

This data is relevant in light of other USPTO refusals, including the recent TTAB decision in Carl’s Jr. Restaurants LLC v. AKM Food Svcs. LLC, Opposition No. 91204459 (March 2, 2017) [not precedential] finding two marks for restaurant services, THE GREEN PEPPER and GREEN BURRITO, likely to be confused. For more details on that case, see the TTABlog® summary here.

The reason I have posted our response is that finding such groupings is quite challenging – there is no easy or intuitive mechanism in the USPTO’s TESS database for finding them. As a result, Applicants are at a disadvantage regarding the types of evidence that can be produced in these types of appeals and cases. By posting our findings below, I hope others will comment or email me with additional pairings and we can “crowdsource” to improve the data for the benefit of all Applicants — I will supplement this post with any additional pairings I receive by posting in the comments or in a separate new post.  If this experiment is positive, I intend to post a similar crowdsource project for beer and wine pairings.

Some examples of our findings:

Rfr-87055289 2017-03-07 Crepes Bonaparte Rfr by Erik Pelton on Scribd