The chicken barney
A folksy image of a fictitious farming couple and the use of the name ‘George’ result in a stoush, 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. Bostock 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 company five years ago, basing their Hawke’s Bay 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. Brinks has 18 per cent of the total chicken market.
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, owners 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’ – a sketch of the brothers as children – but 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 in the creation of George and Jo’s, and many names were considered.
George was ultimately chosen because it has its origin in the Greek word for farmer. He said that George and Jo were ‘‘representations’’ of the farmers who rear their antibiotic-free chickens.
Brinks also claims that its George and Jo’s logo was created in March last year and signed off that May, before Bostock Brothers launched its own rebrand.
Associate professor of commercial law at Auckland University, Alex Simms, said that there was no monopoly on the colour green used by both brands, which was often used to imply environmentally friendly or healthy products.
Equally, there was no monopoly on the name George, but 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’’, she said.
Sheridan said that the design and branding agency Brinks worked with did not know George Bostock’s name or connect it to Bostocks, but Wedd was sceptical, pointing out that the first thing a company did when launching a brand was research competitors.
Another sticking point for the 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 chickens a week of the total of 500,000 across the Brinks operation.
According to recent figures from the Poultry Industry Association, New Zealand produces nearly 100 million chickens a year. Freerange chicken comprises about 20 per cent of the market, and organic chicken 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 was a wider issue to be considered, about marketing.
‘‘If consumers are wanting to support smaller business, they need to do their homework,’’ she says.
George Bostock said the brothers had ‘‘worked really hard to build trust and respect for our ethical farming practices. 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.
In Britain, supermarket chain Tescos came under fire in 2017 for using fake farm names such as Woodside Farm and Boswell Farm for their cheap own-brand meat products.
‘‘It is a live issue,’’ Simms said. ‘‘Just because it happens overseas doesn’t mean it’s been litigated before and it doesn’t mean they aren’t breaching the law. Until you go to a court, you don’t know. ‘‘This is an interesting test case with much wider implications than just Bostocks.’’ The British ‘‘Total Bull’’ campaign argued that this kind of marketing was disingenuous, giving the consumer the impression that the produce came from ‘‘real’’ small-scale farms when in fact it was produced intensively, while hurting small-scale producers.
In 2016, Lewis Road Creamery, a boutique milk producer, took Fonterra to court for its branding of its Kapiti sub-brand, which it argued would confuse shoppers due to clear similarities. The stoush ended when Fonterra changed its branding in 2017. ‘‘We welcome competition, but we feel Brinks should use their own name and not try and imitate our brand and all our hard work,’’ Ben Bostock said. Sheridan said it was not about big versus little company, and both brands were family businesses owned by parent groups.
‘‘They have chosen to farm organically, which we don’t, but we have the greatest respect for what they have achieved,’’ he said.
‘‘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.’’ George Bostock