I mean a lot of companies are like “stop it we don’t want to be a generic trademark!” because it can cause them problems.
Comment on Should I be Concerned?
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Tostitos is a brand so it may be a branding thing and attempt to distance themselves from actual tortilla chips?
They want you to say Tostitos, not “tortilla chips” because to them their brand messaging matters more than your reality.
Aeri@lemmy.world 1 week ago
can@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Like all facial tissue being called “Kleenex” and all inte**rnet searches being called “Googling.”
That is not something either company wants. Neither does Velcro.
LGTM@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Wouldn’t this make them lose their trademark (or whatever the appropriate term is) because it goes into commom use? I swear that happened with another company
papalonian@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I swear that happened with another company
It happened to a number of companies. Flip Phone, Laundromat, Trampoline, Escalator… all used to be protected names.
LGTM@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Flip phone is news to me, so is airfryer???
papalonian@lemmy.world 1 week ago
There’s a couple of surprising ones in there. “Dumpster” was changed for other reasons, but I didnt know it was a name brand.
AngryishHumanoid@lemmynsfw.com 1 week ago
Not exactly, that is a thing but it would be kind of the opposite of this. Let’s say a company was the first to ever make tortilla chips, and tortilla was the brand name. Then other companies started making something like tortilla chips with a different name, but then the name tortilla became so common that the first company lost its trademark so then everybody could call them tortilla chips.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Don’t put your local chip maker on a pedestal, it’s such a simple food.
Anyone can make great chips using only nixtamalized corn and cottonseed oil and salt.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
People are allowed to like things, you know.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I’m m sure those chips are great. I doubt they’re any better than my local chip maker.
4am@lemm.ee 1 week ago
“Don’t put your local chipmaker on a pedestal”
Does sopuli only consist of trolls?
Captain_CapsLock@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I just noticed the Juantonitos instead of Juanitas thing in the store tonight. And I felt like I was being gaslit. Like a Bearenstien bears gag. When did that happen? I would have thought I would have heard about it because they’ve got a factory in the next town over.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
It’s been a slow changeover since 2022 when they lost a trademark dispute with another company that owned the name “Juanita’s” trademark and also made Mexican food.
The website even got updated with the new name, which is a mashup of the names of the original Juanita and her husband Antonio.
wweek.com/…/juanitas-chips-now-sold-nationwideas-…
Sasser, one of the founders of Untitled Goose Game publisher Panic, followed up with the answer in a few days, via a post from The Trademark Lawyer: California-based Juanita’s Foods, a maker and distributor of canned Mexican food products, had filed suit in federal court this August against Juanita’s chips parent company Dominguez Family Foods, alleging it was violating the terms of an agreement to use “Juanita’s” only on products sold in the Pacific Northwest (defined as Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming).
“Plaintiff could have filed a trademark infringement lawsuit and shut down Dominguez” in the late 1980s, the lawsuit claims. “Instead, Plaintiff gave Dominguez the benefit of the doubt. It offered Dominguez an opportunity to continue using the Juanita’s mark, subject to very specific restrictions that were intended to avoid any consumer confusion between their brands.”
Captain_CapsLock@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Thanks for the info. I’m stoked that they didn’t get buried by the lawsuit. They employ a lot of people in my community and their Chilipeño chips are the bomb!
VitoRobles@lemmy.today 1 week ago
Shit. I say Tostitos instead of tortilla chips, because Tostitos taste differently to me. My wife and I love Tostitos and salsa. But I also prefer regular tortilla chips with cheese.
I’ve been indoctrinated.
nomy@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I say “the thin and crispy tortilla chips” and Tostitos is the company that makes those so they get my money.
General_Shenanigans@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Is it not just a new way of distinguishing them from the round (circle) ones?
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
That’s a very generous assumption for a company whose “flavoured, uhhh, triangles” can’t pass the legal threshold of the word “chip” or “snack”, let alone “tortilla”.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
That part I was unaware of. Can you provide evidence for this, because a quick search only surfaces that they were sued for not actually including natural lime flavor in the “hint of lime” chips. They were extensively referred to as “tortilla chips” in those articles.
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Oh, no, we’re in lemmyshitpost, so I was just talking shit about the absolutely insane marketing choice to try to sell them as “triangles”.
But here we are talking about it, so fuck me, it’s working.
4am@lemm.ee 1 week ago
People who read into product labels as if they’re secretly discovering that we’ve all been being fed sawdust and Soylent green instead of real food this whole time are like the sovereign citizens of marketing.
“KFC changed their name because there is no chicken in it anymore and they’re get in trouble legally! It’s just breasts grown in a lab genetically!”
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
I mean, of all things, a food with three ingredients…
burgersc12@mander.xyz 1 week ago
I wouldn’t think the website would be as highly regulated like the outside of the packaging. Maybe I’m wrong tho
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Ingredients lists aren’t tightly regulated? Most of these chips only have three ingredients listed: Corn, Oil, Salt. That’s from the bag of Restaurant Style.
burgersc12@mander.xyz 1 week ago
It’s like when you see a “cheese product”. It is kind of cheese. So these are kind of tortilla chips I bet.