Delhi high court stops Britannia from selling its digestive biscuits
Delhi high court grants Britannia four weeks to phase out existing stocks of NutriChoice Zero and maintain accounts
New Delhi: In an interim relief to ITC Ltd, the Delhi high court on Tuesday restrained rival Britannia Industries Ltd from selling its digestive biscuits NutriChoice Zero.
“Britannia is granted four weeks to phase out existing stocks and maintain accounts," justice S. Muralidhar said, while passing the injunction order.
ITC and Britannia were involved in a copyright infringement case where ITC had claimed that Britannia’s NutriChoice Zero digestive biscuit brand had copied the packaging of ITC’s Sunfeast Farmlite Digestive All Good biscuit. Both are currently sold in a blue and yellow packaging.
While Britannia had initially agreed to change the blue colour of its packaging, it refused to change the yellow colour of the packaging. It told the court that yellow was the dominant colour that it had been using for packaging variants of its digestive biscuits and could not consider changing that.
Taking this a step forward, Britannia said that it was the market leader in digestive biscuits with a 66% share, and brought a counter-suit against ITC for its use of yellow colour on digestive biscuits on 1 September, which is also being heard by the court.
ITC’s petition alleging trademark and copyright infringement because of identical packaging sought payment of damages along with a direction by the court for withdrawal of Britannia’s product from the market.
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