Nestle Petitions To Cancel ‘Seattle Strong’ Coffee Trademark, Arguing It Owns Seattle

Nestle certainly hasn’t been shy about engaging in aggressive trademark enforcement in the past, but this one is something different. We’ve already covered several stories in which a person or company has attempted to trademark the name of a city for a particular market designator. Not use the name of the city in a larger brand name, mind you, but just the name of the city itself. Fortunately, those examples resulted in those trademarks not being registered and it should be plainly obvious as to why: Companies don’t get to lock up a geographical name, like a city, to the exclusion of everyone else being able to use it in business.

Keep that point in mind, because it’s going to be pretty key to this slightly different story in which Nestle, owners of Seattle’s Best Coffee, are trying to invalidate a registered trademark held by Seattle Strong Coffee Co.

Nestlé purchased Seattle’s Best Coffee from Starbucks in 2022 and this April, filed a petition to cancel the Seattle Strong trademark name, claiming it is too similar to Seattle’s Best Coffee. 

“The United States Patent and Trademark Office says we earned ‘Seattle Strong’ and we want to keep it,” said [owner Evan] Oeflein. 

Filings show Seattle Strong responded to Nestlé, saying the petition is “an ill-fated effort by a large multinational company to control the use of the name of the city ‘Seattle’ in coffee-related products in an attempt to bully a small, local coffee company from Seattle.”

Note that this is all to do with the name, not a larger issue of the name combined with trade dress or anything of that nature. Which means, at the end of the day, that this is a fight over the word “Seattle.” After all, “best” and “strong” aren’t the same or similar. “Coffee” is the name of the product and is therefore descriptive, meaning it has little to no role to play in any sort of trademark action. All that’s left is “Seattle” and, as we stated in the opening, there is strong precedent both that geographical trademarks have a very high bar to jump over generally and that trademarks that rely primarily on city names aren’t generally entertained by the USPTO.

And if that holds true, it should follow that claims of similarity between marks that are also heavily or entirely reliant on the similarity being the name of the city should also fail.

“I think there’s a great opportunity to support kind of a David vs Goliath story here,” said Oeflein.

Nestlé has not responded to Fox 13’s request for comment.

“We’re going to stand strong, but we definitely would appreciate the support of Seattle,” said Oeflein.

This looks like nothing more than trademark bullying behavior to this writer. Big as Nestle is, it doesn’t get to pretend that it has a trademark on the city of Seattle.