Nestle-Owned Seattle's Best Coffee Is Trying to Force a Local Canned Coffee Brand to Change Its Name
Oeflein is the founder of Seattle Strong, a canned cold brew company that grew out of a class project for the University of Washington business school. It's been around since 2017 and was granted a trademark on its name in 2023. Seattle Strong's coffee is sold at local grocery chains as well as a few stores outside the state, but it's still a tiny business compared with the Switzerland-based conglomerate Nestle. 'They own over 2,000 brands,' says Oefleign, 'and each individual brand that they own is 50 to 100 times larger than us.'
One of those brands is Seattle's Best Coffee, which Nestle purchased from Starbucks in 2022. Though the company's 'our story' section leans heavily on its local roots — it was founded in the '70s as Stewart Brothers Coffee — Seattle's Best has little to do with its namesake city these days. It appears to have closed all of its U.S. coffee shops and mainly sells its coffee in stores like Target and Walmart.
Last year, Nestle reached out to Oeflein, claiming that Seattle Strong was infringing on its Seattle's Best Coffee trademark. 'They even went so far as to offer to kindly provide me with all the paperwork to abandon my trademark, because it looked like I didn't have legal representation,' he says. 'All I had to do was sign.'
But Oeflein doesn't want to give up the name Seattle Strong has been using for years. He also says that if Nestle thought that 'Seattle Strong' constituted infringement, it could have filed a complaint in 2023, when the trademark was published. He refused to change the name, which led Nestle to escalate its dispute by filing a petition for cancellation with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on April Fools' Day.
Oeflein says that you generally can't trademark generic phrases or place names; Seattle Strong only got its trademark after several years of using the name and obtaining what's known as 'acquired distinctiveness.' Since the only overlap between the two brands is the word Seattle and the fact that they sell coffee in grocery stores, Oeflein says this action is tantamount to a declaration that 'they own the word Seattle for coffee.'
Seattle Strong hired a lawyer to respond to the initial petition, and Nestle's lawyer responded with a motion to immediately dismiss all of Seattle Strong's arguments. 'The signal that we read from it is that they're going to be very aggressive,' says Oeflein, and force Seattle Strong to pay a lot of legal fees to defend its name. Last week Seattle Strong launched a GoFundMe to cover costs, and has raised $5,000 of its $10,000 goal.
Nestle did not respond to a request for comment.
Oeflein is determined to fight this out. 'I don't think they have a case. I don't think they have a strong argument,' he says. 'It's our name. We earned it.' See More:
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San Francisco Chronicle
12 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
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New York Post
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