Whole Foods Market says it’s “America’s Healthiest Grocery Store.”
Now, the grocery chain is looking to update its slogan to reflect a loftier moniker: “World’s Healthiest Grocery Store.”
Unfortunately for the grocer’s efforts, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently rejected its application to register that slogan. Whole Foods will have six months to update and refile the case and may choose not to do so, although that seems unlikely.
On top of that, Whole Foods’s attempts to break into the global market has been slow. It launched its first international outlet 14 years ago and has opened just 19 since, in just three countries.
The agency said it rejected the trademark because it makes a “laudatory” claim, or is based on exaggerated praise that can’t be proven or has not been proved true. For instance, Papa John’s slogan “Better Ingredients, Better Pizza” was initially struck down by a court in 2000 because it could not substantiate that it indeed had better ingredients than all of its competitors.
Companies still try to trademark these sorts of affirmations anyway, said Jonathan Hyman, a partner at California-based intellectual property law firm Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear. “Companies attempt to register these kinds of marks all the time, though it’s sometimes not successful.”
That’s because they can manage to argue that the superlative is a distinguishing mark of the company, rather than a factual statement, Hyman said. Papa John’s continued to advertise their pizza pies with “Better Ingredients, Better Pizza” because their consumers already associated that with their company. Whole Foods used a similar argument when it managed to claim “America’s Healthiest Grocery Store” in 2010, wrote Mike Ortega, trademark consultant for brand agency Interbrand, in an Interbrand publication.
They could also use facts to back up their slogan. “Leading Brand” or “Trusted by Moms” are approved taglines when a brand can quantitatively prove that those are indeed true.
But Whole Foods isn’t really recognized as the world’s healthiest grocery store. It functions only in the United States, England and Canada, which is hardly the entire globe. On top of that, few probably associate the phrase “World’s Healthiest Grocery Store” with Whole Foods; it has never used the slogan.
“The trademark application could be a sign that Whole Foods could be planning to expand its locations beyond just three countries,” Ortega wrote.
It does indicate that Whole Foods is still looking to continue to expand globally. Based in Austin, Whole Foods opened its first international outlet in Toronto in 2002 and expanded shortly afterward to the United Kingdom.
The international push has not been as lucrative as executives hoped. That’s in part thanks to efforts by cheaper options such as Walmart to expand its organic sections and preexisting upscale grocers that have claimed what might be Whole Food’s clientele, such as the United Kingdom’s Waitrose.
