How Fig Newmans Benefited from Fig Newtons [94]
The guys discuss the beneficial license granted to Fig Newmans from Nabisco and also answer the question, "What things can I do to make my C Corp more attractive to investors?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: And welcome to the business legal podcast where we cover business in the news and also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to our podcast at ask@email or… MATT: I feel like you’re doing it on purpose now. NASIR: No, I’m not – ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. You can email us at ask@email. Ah, all right, just don’t even email us. Just call us and leave a message. But you can also send us a tweet at @askbizlaw as well. And that’s our episode! MATT: I don’t even have a comment. Yeah, I feel like that took the entire time. NASIR: Oh, yeah, I’m sorry about that. I was just so excited about today’s episode that I got distracted. MATT: Yeah? You’re a big fan of Fig Newtons or Fig Newmans? NASIR: It’s kind of confusing. I went to get a snack out of the pantry and I found some Fig Newmans and I didn’t even know they were Fig Newmans. In fact, my wife and I had a whole conversation about figs in general for some reason and we kept referring to Fig Newtons and I’m like, “Wait a minute! These aren’t Fig Newtons. They’re Fig Newmans!” and she was like, “No, I thought I bought Fig Newtons.” But, apparently, there’s this other brand that’s called Fig Newmans that is pretty much the exact same thing as Fig Newtons and it was a little confusing. I was trying to figure out how the heck did this company name their brand? Was this some kind of generic brand or what have you and somehow they were able to get away with this trademark infringement? Because it’s so obvious. There’s no likelihood of confusion; we were confused! We thought we bought Fig Newtons but we didn’t. And so, I was very frustrated so I had to some legal research on some of the trademark. First thing I found was that both Fig Newton and Fig Newman were registered as a trademark under the same category. It was like some weird category like cookies or miniature cookies or something like that so I couldn’t figure it out. I had to do some research on it. MATT: Yeah, I’ve heard of the Newmans. I didn’t know they made Fig Newmans. I started laughing multiple times because I just can’t stop thinking of Newman from Seinfeld – how this would be like Kramer’s knock-off product that he could create, Fig Newmans. NASIR: There was no picture of Newman on the outside in the old man’s uniform holding these cookies. MATT: You know, you looked into this. How did this happen? I looked into this story, too. For those of you that don’t know, Fig Newtons are owned by Nabisco which I think people have heard of. I guess one of the guys started Fig Newmans, they were just trying to make these Fig Newmans, he wrote a letter to the president of Nabisco and said, “My daughter’s got a great idea for a product. Can we sit down and talk about a small royalty deal? All the profits will go to charity.” I guess the president just wrote back, “You know what? This sounds good. How about $1.00 a year?” which is pretty unbelievable that this would ever happen. I mean, obviously, I don’t think Fig Newtons were really worried about losing a chunk of the market or any sort of significant amount – not worried about that at all. But we talk about so many bad things that happen in the intellectual property world. You know, the fact that they can come to this sort of agreement that there’s no sort of infringement on the name, it’s finally nice to hear a good story. NASIR: It also shows you that I did more research. I couldn’t figure out if it’s still going to charity or not because I was like, “Oh, well, at least we’re contributing to something,” but I think what’s funny in this concept is that the legal department of Nabisco had said that they had a fit bec...