What’s in a word? Branding row won’t let umami firm stay ‘Honest’

Monosodium glutamate, a flavour enhancer with a controversial reputation, is used in a wide variety of products, often hidden behind terms such as “hydrolysed vegetable protein” or the flavouring E621. According to Miller, Honest Umami is challenging the “historical, nonsensical, and inescapably racist reasons” for MSG’s poor reputation. But it’s now in jeopardy.

“It would set us back to square one,” Miller told The Observer, adding that legal costs from the trademark dispute and discarding already made packaging would be unaffordable. “I don’t know whether we would just jack it in at that point.”

Miller said he and his co-founders had “sunk all our not exactly substantial life savings” into Honest Umami. The product had been marketed by influencers and is sold on Ocado. It registered “Honest Umami” as a trademark last year, but Honest Burgers’ challenge is set to go to tribunal .

“Their claim is that umami is just a descriptive word, the secondary thing, [and] that we’re basically calling our brand ‘Honest’,” said Miller. “Which is quite the opposite. Umami is the point, the way we’re going about it is honest.”

In a witness statement seen by The Observer, Honest Burgers’ chief marketing officer Marcus Denison-Smith said: “Whilst we are sympathetic to our competitors and don’t like to take action unless we really feel that we need to, we cannot, for the integrity of our brand, allow other third parties to use and register similar names. This will cause consumer confusion and will dilute the brand that we have spent many years and great expense building.”

A lawyer with experience in trademark disputes told The Observer it was not a clearcut case and that both sides had reasonable arguments.

It is not the first time a food brand has faced this kind of dispute. In 2022, Sonora Taquería, a Mexican restaurant in London, was challenged by another London establishment, Taquería, over the use of taquería – a generic term in Spanish for a taco spot. Sonora Taquería is still using it.

“The whole purpose of trademark law is to avoid consumers getting confused, and we think there’s no consumer in the world who’d look at a pot of Honest Umami and a burger restaurant and think they were somehow related,” said Miller, who added it “feels like bullying”. He said there were several other brands with “honest” in their name, including Liverpool cafe Honest Coffee and Manchester pizzeria Honest Crust.

Photographs by PA/Alamy, Honest Umami