WHAT’S UP CHOOK?

A big company’s folksy image of a fictitious farming couple and the use of the name ‘George’ has made some Kiwi chicken farmers clucking mad, writes Bonnie Flaws.

Chicken farmers Ben and George Bostock are taking legal action against one of the country’s chicken giants,

Brinks, alleging it has breached the Fair Trading Act.

Bostocks Brothers, owned by the Bostock Group, filed court documents on December 4, but Brinks has yet to respond and court dates have not been set.

The Bostocks started the Hawke’s Bay company five years ago, basing their business on sustainable farming and raising organic free-range chickens housed in chalets on an apple orchard.

Brinks is one of the big three producers in New Zealand. The others are Tegel, which owns the Rangitikei free-range brand, and Inghams, which owns the

Waitoa free-range brand.

The brothers allege that Brinks’ free-range antibiotic-free brand, George and Jo’s, misrepresents the product to consumers.

The brand was launched last year and sports a logo with a sketch of a happy, but fictitious, farming couple.

Ben Bostock said they were concerned that ‘‘a large-scale, corporate chicken producer was trying to deceive and mislead consumers, portraying that they were also a small family-run business’’.

Michael Sheridan, chief operating officer of Van Den Brink Group, owner of the Brinks brand, said it had worked hard to achieve a ‘‘completely antibiotic-free flock without use of organics,’’ and at a ‘‘more affordable price point,’’ a first of its kind product in New Zealand.

George Bostock said that not only was the George and Jo’s logo similar to Bostocks’ sketch of the brothers as children, but that using the name ‘‘George’’ was causing confusion for consumers.

Bostocks spokeswoman Catherine Wedd said the company had received dozens of emails and Facebook messages from confused customers asking if George and Jo’s was the same as Bostock Brothers.

Sheridan said that Brinks worked with an experienced design and brand company to create George and Jo’s, and lots of names were considered. George was ultimately chosen because it has its origin in the Greek word for farmer, and George and Jo were ‘‘representations’’ of the farmers that grow their antibiotic-free chickens.

Associate professor of commercial law at Auckland University, Alex Simms, said that there was no claim to the colour green used by both brands, which was often used for implying environmentally friendly or healthy products, and there was no claim to the name ‘‘George’’.

But she added that there were ‘‘a whole lot of male names you could use, so why pick George? It’s not breaching the law but it’s treading on toes’’.

Sheridan said the design and branding agency Brinks worked with didn’t know George

Bostock by name or connect it to Bostocks, but Wedd was sceptical, pointing out that the first thing a company does when launching a brand is research competitors.

Another sticking point for Bostocks was the marketing for George and Jo’s farmers’ collective. Bostocks argues that the chickens are owned and supplied by Brinks, and are ‘‘contract grown’’, a claim Brinks denies.

‘‘Our George and Jo’s chickens come from four farms. Our farmers would prefer to stay out of the spotlight and were happy to be marketed under the George & Jo’s name,’’ Sheridan said, pointing out that they were independently owned farms and produced around 166,000 of 500,000 chickens a week across the whole Brinks operation.

According to figures from the Poultry Industry Association, New Zealand produces nearly 100 million chickens a year and free-range chicken makes up about 20 per cent of the market. Organic chicken commands less than 1 per cent.

The Bostocks have calculated the company has just 0.4 per cent of the total market.

Simms said that while it was standard practice for large brands to create sub-brands for different offerings, and that it was not ‘‘clandestine’’, there were wider questions about the way brands were marketed.

‘‘If consumers are wanting to support smaller business, they need to do their homework,’’ she said. George Bostock said the brothers had ‘‘worked really hard to build trust and respect for our ethical farming practises. We are the faces behind our brand and feel it’s really unfair that a large chicken producer is trying to imitate what we do and mislead consumers’’.

‘‘It’s unbelievable that they have adopted my name, George, and are trying to pass them off as real, when in fact they are fake people,’’ he said. UK supermarket chain Tescos came under fire in 2017 for using fake farm names like Woodside Farm and Boswell Farm for their cheap own-

‘It’s unbelievable that they have adopted my name, George, and are trying to pass themselves off as real, when in fact they are fake people.’ GEORGE BOSTOCK