Delhi High Court today refrained from passing an interim order on Britannia Industries Ltd’s plea challenging a single judge’s order restraining them from using the packaging of its ‘Nutri Choice Digestive Zero’ biscuits in its present form.
“In the meantime, nothing,” a bench of justices B D Ahmed and Ashutosh Kumar said when the counsel for Britannia urged the court for an interim order on the single judge verdict restraining it from using its ‘Nutri Choice Digestive Zero’ biscuits wrapper in its present form, saying it was “deceptively similar” to the packaging of ITC’s Sunfeast ‘Farmlite Digestive All Good’ biscuits.
Britannia sought an interim order as the counsel for ITC Ltd was not able to conclude his submission today and would continue tomorrow.
Earlier, Britannia had submitted that their business was affected due to the September 6 order of the single judge as manufacturing of the product has been stopped.
Senior advocates Sandeep Sethi, Pratibha M Singh and Rajiv Nayar, representing ITC, submitted Britania had “adopted” their packaging and even lines on the packs were “replicated” by them.
In its appeal, Britannia, had submitted that the order was “erroneous” as the single judge had not considered the fact that their packaging was different from that of ITC’s.
The single judge had granted four weeks to Britannia to phase out the existing stocks of ‘Nutri Choice Zero Digestive’ biscuits with the present packaging.
The single judge order had come on a plea filed by ITC Ltd seeking to restrain Britannia from violating its rights in packaging/trade dress of ‘Sunfeast Farmlite Digestive-All Good’ biscuits by allegedly using a deceptively and confusingly similar trade dress for ‘Nutri Choice Digestive Zero’ biscuits.
It had asked Britannia to adopt a “distinctively different” packaging from the one currently used by ITC for its biscuit as such “deception” could confuse the consumers.
The single judge had said it would be open to Britannia to adopt the packaging it uses for the product internationally or, while retaining the yellow colour, it could substitute the blue colour in the packaging with any other distinctive colour other than variants of blue.
( Source – PTI )
