Apple Opposes Meal Planning SMB’s Pear Logo

Prepear, a small company spun off from parent Super Healthy Kids and focused on meal planning and grocery lists, is under legal attack from Apple for an alleged similarity in the company’s logos, a news report says.

Super Healthy Kids posted about the issue on Twitter, saying Apple “has decided to oppose and go after our small business @prepearapp trademark saying our Pear logo is too close to their Apple and supposedly hurts their brand.”

A legal notice from Apple, posted in the news report, shows the company’s justification for the lawsuit as “priority and likelihood of confusion” and “dilution by blurring.”

A petition on Change.org from Prepear co-founder and COO Russell Monson says Apple has a tendency to go after companies with fruit-based logos even when the logos “don’t look anything like Apple’s logo, or aren’t in the same line of business as Apple at all.”

Many of the previous cases, Monson writes, have been forced to change the logos or abandon them, not being able to afford the extravagant costs of fighting the lawsuits. Prepear has only five employees, Monson writes, and the experience of going through the lawsuit, which has already resulted in the company having to lay off an employee, has been “very terrifying.”

“We feel a moral obligation to take a stand against Apple’s aggressive legal action against small businesses and fight for the right to keep our logo,” he writes in the petition. “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.”

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Apple has stayed resilient throughout the pandemic, reporting strong revenue in the recent quarterly results from July 30. The company managed to generate $26.42 billion in the quarter, far exceeding the estimations of the pandemic economy.

Apple, along with other big tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon, have nevertheless faced scrutiny in the past few months, too, including appearing before Congress to talk about competition and antitrust issues. PYMNTS, however, posits that the danger of monopoly might not be as threatening as it seems in the digital age, since many tech companies are all vying for certain sectors of the economy like social commerce, groceries and more.