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Peter Looser, owner of Star Trade, may be making a lot of chocolate lovers happy as far afield as Europe, the US and Japan, but he's definitely not flavour of the month with those in charge of protecting the trademark rights of the Swiss army, writes the local trade magazine Handelszeitung.

Swiss Army chocolate

 
The design of Looser's 'Swiss Army' chocolate is modelled closely on that of the chocolate issued to Swiss soldiers and, therefore - in a country in which national service remains mandatory - familiar to everyone. The 50-gramme bars of dark chocolate are wrapped in silver paper and differ only in that they contain guarana and cornflake fragments, Handelszeitung says.

Evidently a sales success, Looser is aiming for revenues of SFr. 1 million by next year. Not, in the scheme of things, a massive amount, but enough to capture the attention of Armasuisse, the body responsible for ensuring that the 'Swiss Army' brand is correctly applied, under licence, to those products which have received official approval.

In addition to 'Swiss Army' chocolate, Looser's Start Trade company also markets 'Swiss Navy' mints and 'Swiss Natural' confectionery.

The 'Swiss Army' brand belongs jointly to the Sackmesser-based firm Victorinox and the Swiss Confederation, Handelszeitung says, represented by Armasuisse. The military authorities struck a deal in 1996 with Swiss Army Brand Inc., which now belongs to Victorinox, allowing the company to use the brand for its famous knives. Victorinox has since invested heavily in building up the equity of the brand, something Star Trade is not taking into account as it pays no licence fee for its use on chocolate products, despite having registered it with the country's trademark authorities.

Looser maintains, in any case, that 'Swiss Army' is too generic a name as to allow the military to claim intellectual property rights over it and bar others from using it. The authorities dealing with such issues in Switzerland will make a decision on that later this year.

The posture adopted by Armasuisse, which is considering pursuing Looser through the courts, is heavily influenced by the fact that it has been seeking to establish its own brand endorsement, "Approved by Armasuisse", on a range of products since the beginning of the year. Not that it has had tremendous success so far, a spokesman admits, with income from that source amounting to no more than SFr. 100,000. Perhaps, Handelszeitung suggests, that's down to the fact that it is a compromise term decided on after the licence for the much more powerful 'Swiss Army' denomination had been ceded to Victorinox.

Victorinox appears to be marginally less bothered by Star Trade's advance into the chocolate market, admitting that it has no plans itself to market chocolate. Nevertheless, as a spokesman for the company admits to Handelseitung: "The Swiss Army brand is extremely lucrative".