Efko entered into a settlement agreement on the right to the brand with the Udarnik poultry farm

The Efko group of companies, which promotes products from plant analogues of MEAT under the Hi (Healthy Innovations) brand, encountered a problem during its registration due to the existence of the Hi Egg trademark, which has been owned by the Udarnik poultry farm (Leningrad region) since 2014.

According to the managing partner of the Uskov & Partners law firm, the Hi Egg brand serves as a kind of bridge to the new Efko trademarks, so one of the holding’s enterprises, KRTs Efko-Kaskad LLC (Belgorod Region), challenged the right of OAO Udarnik Poultry Farm” for the Hi Egg trademark in the Arbitration COURT of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.

In the last days of March, the parties entered into a settlement agreement. By decision of the court, the right to a trademark passes to the plaintiff. The agreement includes a clause stating that the poultry farm will not interfere with the registration of all three Efko trademarks.

Georgy Melkov, a representative of the St. Petersburg law office "Legal Office of Gessen", noted the atypicality of the process. The fact is that Udarnik Poultry Farm OJSC is going through bankruptcy proceedings, and taking into account the position of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, a claim for early termination of the right to a trademark should be considered as part of the company’s insolvency case. In this case, it was not considered by the Intellectual Property Court, but by the same arbitration court that deals with the bankruptcy case of the poultry farm.

The Hi Egg brand in the settlement agreement is valued at 50 thousand rubles, and this amount is less than 5% of the book value of the bankrupt enterprise. Since the summer of 2020, when a monitoring procedure was introduced for the Udarnik poultry farm, any transactions for amounts exceeding the established threshold of 5% require the approval of the arbitration manager. From the materials of the court it is not clear whether an examination of the value of the trademark was carried out.

Dmitry Galkin, managing partner of Marketing Logic analytical company, considers the filing of a lawsuit by Efko and interest in the Hi Egg brand to be quite justified. The holding is developing the production of vegetable meat substitutes and plans to reach the volume of 40 thousand tons by the end of 2022. Given the active recovery of the HoReCa segment, the dynamics of increasing demand for meat alternatives can pick up pace up to 10% per year, says Galkin, and due to increased competition, the price of meat analogues will begin to decline.