Forest Whole Foods is on a mission: “to make organic, whole food affordable so people can build themselves and the next generation with honest, healthy food.”
Their mantra is “to make a natural life accessible so that more people are eating real food and cooking from scratch.”
Forest Whole Foods is an online organic food retailer, based in Christchurch, Dorset. It is a family-run business that has grown from small beginnings. In fact you could say it literally sprouted from a small packet of seeds.
As a family, the owners were getting tired of spending their money on elaborate food packaging and fancy branding. They wanted to eat healthily and choose organic produce to feed their family but their choices seemed limited. They knew there must be a better way of finding healthy, quality food that was both affordable but also ethically sourced. So the Forest Whole Foods story began, retailing and wholesaling certified organic whole foods both in the UK and overseas including serving the local New Forest market through local click and collect services.
The company started trading in 2016 from the owner’s front room, but with shelves full of produce piling high and with the company experiencing rapid growth they moved to industrial premises in 2017 and started taking on employees.
Going from strength to strength the business won the New Forest Business Partnership Brilliance in Business awards in 2017.
Realizing that protecting their brand was critically important the owner approached London IP in 2017 seeking to register their company name as a trademark in order to safeguard use of their name in future.
As with all trademark enquiries, we asked our client to send us a list of all the goods/services they wished to cover under this application.
We also advised our client to ensure they hadn’t missed out any goods/services as these cannot be added to an application after filing; with all trademark applications it is extremely important to cover all your interests at the outset with a view to future diversification.
Once our client had supplied us with a list of all their chosen product categories it was the attorney’s job to then itemise the individual classifications of goods and services.
An example of the goods that Forest Whole Foods is registered for: agricultural, horticultural and forestry products; fresh fruits and vegetables, seeds, natural plants and flowers.
Once it was established how many ‘classes’ of goods the client wished to cover we were able to confirm the cost of filing the trademark application.
Increasing the number of classes meant the costs of the filing would increase accordingly, but it was advised that the client delete any goods that they were absolutely sure they would never wish to sell as this meant minimizing the chances of any conflict arising.
A trademark attorney from London IP then carried out a clearance search for any obviously problematic marks and once a strategy was agreed with the client a UK trademark application was filed.
After some slight amendments of the trademark specification the application was accepted by the UKIPO and then published. Following a standard two-month opposition period the trademark was registered and Forest Whole Foods became a bona fide registered trademark.
A company’s brand becomes synonymous with what it represents. For Forest Whole Foods the name is associated with key factors, words such as: organic, quality, affordable, traceability, ethically sourced, healthy, environmentally conscious.
Registering their trademark has protected the investment in both time and money that Forest Whole Foods has put, and continues to put, into promoting their brand.
Forest Whole Foods is constantly developing its product range and alongside selling whole foods also has a whole host of delicious recipes on their blog to follow for creative and tasty ways to enjoy the range of foods on offer.
Now there are no excuses for not knowing what to do with that pack of bulgur wheat you have tucked away in your kitchen cupboard! And who knew what moon milk was…?
