Apple sues small recipe app ‘Prepear’ over its corporate logo, company alleges 'bullying'

Apple is taking legal action against the meal planner company for its recipe app ‘Prepear’ over its corporate logo, that Apple claims, resembles its own trademarked logo. In an Instagram post, the small business said that Apple raised objection to its “minimalistic fruit design”. Meanwhile, Apple, in the notice of opposition filed at US Patent and Trademark Office mentioned that the Prepear’s its “right-angled leaf readily calls to mind Apple’s famous Apple Logo and creates a similar commercial impression.” 

In further accusations, Apple claimed its Health app mostly has similar designs like the Prepear’s and consumers could mistake it for one of its products. Meanwhile, the meal-planning app Prepear uses Apple’s mobile App Store to make its product available to the consumers. The Health app “provides a central repository for health and fitness data one of the categories highlighted on Apple’s Health app is Nutrition,” Apple wrote in the notice. It further said, “consumers readily associate the Apple Marks with medicine, health, and general wellness”. Apple accused Prepear app, a product of Super Healthy Kids, a small food blog initiative by a dietitian named Natalie Monson, of causing “confusion, mistake or deception”. 

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Bullying small businesses

However, in an Instagram post, Monson lashed out at the tech giant firm, saying, “We are defending ourselves against Apple not only to keep our logo but to send a message to big tech companies that bullying small businesses has consequences.” She further alleged that “The trillion-dollar Apple, has decided to oppose and go after our small business’ trademark saying our pear logo is too close to their Apple logo and supposedly hurts their brand? While the rest of the world is going out of their way to help small businesses during this pandemic, Apple has chosen to go after our small business.”

Further, the brand’s petition organizer and Prepear co-founder Russell Monson wrote, “Apple has been opposing small businesses with fruit-related logos by starting expensive legal action even when those logos don’t look anything like Apple’s logo, or aren’t in the same line of business as Apple at all.” 

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