Industry News - PM

Pork Board sends cease-and-desist letter for mythical “new white meat”


By Dani Friedland on 6/22/2010

The National Pork Board has sent a 12-page cease-and-desist letter to a Web site that offered canned unicorn meat as part of an April Fools' Day joke.

The Pork Board demanded that ThinkGeek.com stop infringing on its trademarked slogan after the tagline "Pâté is passé. Unicorn — the new white meat" appeared in an online description of the fictitious product.

The issue is purely legal, National Pork Board Vice President of Domestic Marketing Ceci Snyder told Meatingplace. "Laughs aside, the attorneys were doing their work that they do to protect our trademark," she said.

"It was never our intention to cause a national crisis and misguide American citizens regarding the differences between the pig and the unicorn," said Geeknet, Inc. President and CEO Scott Kauffman, in a statement. "In fact, ThinkGeek's canned unicorn meat is sparkly, a bit red, and not approved by any government entity," he said of the fictional product.

ThinkGeek has announced several fake products on April Fools' Day for the last few years. Previous gag offerings have included a squeezable tube of bacon paste and caffeinated meatloaf.

"Ironically, other than the Pork Board, we do more than anybody else to promote pig consumption among geeks," Kauffman said in a statement. Real products for sale at ThinkGeek include bacon soap, bacon popcorn and bacon-flavored envelopes.

Mountain View, Calif.,-based Geeknet, which owns ThinkGeek.com as well as several other geek-related websites, has apologized to the Pork Board.


 
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