Worthington Foods, Inc. v. Kellogg Co.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that the mark HEARTWISE applied to food did not permit the consumer to “directly cull a message concerning the healthy characteristics of the good simply from looking at the mark”
• holding that the strength of mark factor did not favor a finding of likelihood of confusion in a reverse confusion case, inter alia, because the Heartwise mark was “not, by its inherent nature, a ‘strong’ mark; it [was] neither fanciful nor arbitrary”
• stating that generic mark is term commonly used as name or description of kind of goods
• noting flaws in Jacoby study and holding that “the Court does not place great weight on Dr. Jacoby’s study”
• finding a 24 25 higher degree of care where plaintiff conceded “that 26 those who purchase its products are well-educated, 27 health-conscious consumers”
• finding that, in a reverse confusion case, the strength of the mark factor did not weigh in favor of a finding of a likelihood of confusion in part because the plaintiffs mark was not fanciful or arbitrary and, therefore, not a strong mark

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).