This is not about the restaurant or drinks but about the legal obligations of using someones product to make another one so I don’t want comments of a good or bad idea for food (these aren’t the recipes anyway) but just a question about the legality and where it starts or stops.
I have 2 business ideas right now.
One is involving mixing regular person’s dinner into a restaurant. So for example I would purchase and make Hamburger Helper™ and throw in salsa and a little jalapenos or whatever I want to put in to this recipe. I put these extra ingredients and don’t use the brand name anywhere.
Can I do this.
What if I have this new drink combo that’s like redbull. It requires or uses a brand of soda like say Jack & Coke but with more ingredients? If say it has ingredient 1,2,3,4,5 and redbull but I don’t say it contains redbull but just the ingredients in red bull would I/or I guess would suing me probably work if I created these concoctions based on existing products.
As far as I know you can’t relabel a product but if you put it into a new use and disclose required ingredients and it would be legal and patentable but I may be wrong.
Licensing of the drink I invented tonight rests in the Reddit family hands. Let them in on the drink of the century and risk getting ripped off or can I somehow patent or otherwise protect my drink or restaurant idea.
Of course you can relabel someone else’s product. That’s what most products are—combinations of existing (possibly branded) products with some new label slapped on. Restaurants don’t grow, harvest, butcher, and process all their food themselves—they buy existing products in large quantities, and mix them together to produce meals. The tomato sauce used by your local pizza joint may well contain Del Monte-brand canned tomatoes, for example.
You can make and serve hamburger helper without calling it such on the menu. No licensing required.
You can’t patent a mixed drink, but you could get a trademark for a name that you give it. Trademarks are awfully expensive, so I can’t see how this would make any sense unless you’re running a franchise.
As far as re-labeling – you can take another product and put your own label on it – ie, take Jack Daniels and call it DJInteractive Hooch. Or you can mix Jack Daniels and Coke and call it a Whizzy. You still have to comply with legal disclosures (ie, you can’t hide the fact that a drink has alcohol in it).
There is IIRC no patents involved. Patents are business processes, or electro-mechanical devices, not food, mathematical formulas, etc - unless you are monsanto and patent a particular new genetic form of corn or pig etc.
Trademarks are how you identify your own “brand” of whatever. Coke or Pepsi or DJInteractive - so that people know when they buy that name they are buying your product. You can remarket someone else’s brand as yours, provided there is no deception involved.
The classic case of this, however, IIRC, was Buick(?) switching motors for a lesser brand (Chrysler?) that was direct drop-in replacement but considered lesser quality - a class action over this in the 80’s resulted in a hefty settlement with customers. If you sell a concoction with an implied expensive liquor in it, then substitute the el cheapo booze - well, it depends on why the customers thought it was the better stuff and how you advertised it. However, the rule with trademarks IIRC is generally whether a reasonable(!?) person would mistakenly believe that the product is in fact from Coke or Pepsi or Jack Daniels, rather than a different company. You have to be careful how prominently you advertise “Coke Float” or DJ Whiz, and whether you include the trademark picture/logo, company colours, etc. Obviously if the product includes theirs you can say so, but be careful how prominent their name is to avoid implications of endorsement etc. TV and Movies blur the logos to avoid niusance suits.
OTOH, if you are McDonalds, the candy company may pay YOU to advertise Rolo or Nerds Flurries…
Of course food can be patented, at least in the US. The USPTO itself even has a FAQ on this very topic:
In the US, strictly speaking you can’t patent a mathematical formula, though people have argued that the existence of software patents effectively gets around this restriction. (That is, while you can’t patent the formula itself, you can patent a computer program which constitutes a “practical application” of said formula.)