Apple object to Prepear logo trademark, ‘terrifying’ small business owners

A small-business owner is facing the “terrifying” possibility of fighting the valuable, trillion-dollar tech company in court over its logo.

One of the world’s most valuable tech companies has filed a lawsuit to stop a small business from trademarking its logo.

Apple claims the “minimalistic fruit design” of Prepear’s pear logo and its “right-angled leaf … readily calls to mind Apple’s famous Apple Logo and creates a similar commercial impression,” according to Apple’s notice of opposition before the US Patent and Trademark Office, obtained by MacRumours.

Prepear is a meal-planning app that lets users store and organise recipes and it relies on Apple’s mobile App Store to deliver its app.

Apple also claimed its own Health app does a similar thing as Prepear and consumers could mistake it for one of its products because it seems like something the company would make.

The Apple logo is recognised around the world and the company is deadly serious about protecting it. Picture: Mladen Antonov/AFP

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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 also claimed that “consumers readily associate the Apple Marks with medicine, health, and general wellness”.

Apple opposes the registration, claiming the logo is “likely to cause confusion, mistake or deception”.

The Prepear app comes from Super Healthy Kids, a food blog started by dietitian and mother of four Natalie Monson.

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In a post on Instagram, Ms Monson has slammed the computing giant’s claim, and said she felt a “moral obligation” to take a stand against it.

“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,” Ms Monson wrote.

“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.”

She alleged Apple had done a similar thing to “dozens of other small business fruit logo companies”.

Natalie Monson's Prepear app is designed to help parents plan healthy meals. Picture: Instagram/Natale Monson

The app itself was sparked by the actions of another Big Five tech company, inspired by the halving of traffic to Ms Monson’s blog after Facebook changed an algorithm.

“I wanted to build a platform for other bloggers to implement the same strategies I did so that when the algorithms change, when privacy regulations change, when the internet changes and you don’t have control over your traffic and ad revenue, your business doesn’t die,” Ms Monson wrote on the platform’s website.

“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,” petition organiser and Prepear co-founder Russell Monson said on its Change.org page.

On Monday morning, the petition was racing to its target of 25,000 signatories, with more than 18,500 signatories.

The Apple logo is well known around the world and the company has sought to protect it in the past.

Last year the company objected to a trademark filing by a Norwegian political party that used an apple.

The company also objected to a trademark filed in 2018 for the Apfel Route cyclepath in Germany, a themed bike route through a large apple growing area of the country.