Company Outsider: Peace over chocolate, war over butter chicken. Time to end the corporate crusades choking our courts

Company Outsider is a weekly newsletter by Sundeep Khanna.

Twenty-five years is a long time. Longer than many marriages, many careers, and the entire lifespan of several companies that were born and died in that time. This is how long Mars Wrigley and Cadbury spent in Indian courts fighting over the word 'Celebrations.'

The irony is unmistakable. Two chocolate companies whose businesses have been built on spreading joy were locked in mortal combat over a word that literally means happiness. Delhi High Court’s Justice Sanjeev Narula, while approving a settlement reached by both parties, said the term Celebrations became “the epicentre of legal contest, its cheerful ring turning into a matter of serious deliberation for decades.”

Sadly, the Mars-Cadbury slugfest isn’t an outlier but a more common event than logic would recommend.

Battle for butter chicken

Consider the Great Battle of Butter Chicken. Moti Mahal and Daryaganj, two Delhi eateries, are sparring in a 2,752-page case over who invented butter chicken and dal makhani. Leo Tolstoy needed fewer words in his weighty tome War and Peace to chronicle Napoleon’s invasion of Russia than two restaurants need to argue over common Punjabi cuisine.

Then there’s IndiGo, apparently worried passengers might confuse its flights with Mahindra’s BE 6e electric car because both use 6E. One flies at 30,000 feet, the other drives on roads. Yet, lakhs were poured into legal fees to sort that one out. Meanwhile, Amul won an interim injunction against Italian firm Terre Primitive, after successfully arguing that for the cookies it was marketing under the trademark Amuleti, it had copied the design, font and presentation of the Indian firm’s logo with the only dissimilar element being the suffix 'eti'.

What these corporate crusades really cost is time, money and opportunity. Even as Mars battled Cadbury in court, it posted losses for the last two years, while sales inched up to a mere ₹2,329 crore in 2024. The company deliberately shied away "from innovating too much because by the time a new product reaches the end of a distribution line, the newness becomes obsolete". Smart strategy or a lack of innovation?

Chocolate war

Cadbury fared better, but its dominance masks stagnation. While Mondelez India (Cadbury's parent) is the leader in India’s chocolate market, approximately 70% of revenue still comes from just two products: Dairy Milk and 5 Star. For a company that entered India in 1948, this product concentration reveals a strange lack of innovation. Compare this with its rival Amul, which revamped its chocolate business post-2000, expanding from six products to 46 variants across seven categories.

Defenders of these brand contests invoke intellectual property and market confusion, both legitimate concerns. Under India’s Trade Marks Act, 1999, Section 29 defines infringement as using a mark “identical or deceptively similar” to a registered one in a way likely to confuse consumers. But the Act also sets limits which permit fair and honest use that doesn’t unfairly exploit another’s reputation. In other words, the law was meant to protect innovation, not ossify it.

Judicial load

There’s also the small matter of India’s judicial system groaning under more than 50 million pending cases. When Fortune 500 companies occupy courtrooms over a trademark for a quarter-century, they’re not just burning their own money; they’re consuming scarce judicial resources that could resolve disputes affecting ordinary citizens.

Indian courts have long wrestled with how to balance protection with public interest. In the Cadila Healthcare vs Cadila Pharmaceuticals case of 2001, the Supreme Court held that even minor differences can’t excuse deceptive similarity, especially in sectors where confusion could harm consumers. More recently, in ITC Ltd vs Nestle India, the Delhi High Court reaffirmed that trademark rights aren’t monopolies over descriptive phrases and so, ITC couldn’t block Nestle’s “Magic Masala” because the term was common to the trade. Together, these cases show that while protection of marks is essential, courts frown on overreach that stifles competition or clings to generic language.

And that’s the real takeaway from the Celebrations saga. Mars and Cadbury weren’t fighting over a new molecule or a revolutionary new recipe. They were fighting over a word so universal that the court itself noted its “cheerful” and “generic” nature. Thankfully, after decades of legal jousting, they finally chose goodwill over grievance, agreeing to distribute assortments of chocolates worth ₹5 lakh each to Delhi schoolchildren.

Perhaps that’s what India Inc. needs - a Celebrations Clause where any trademark dispute dragging beyond five years should automatically trigger a requirement to donate equivalent legal fees to a good cause. At least, then someone would have reason to smile.