ST. LOUIS — A smiling cookie in St. Louis has bakers from Pennsylvania frowning. It's no joking matter for them; they sent a cease and desist letter to a St. Louis bakery, telling them they have to change the name of their grinning cookies.
"Each smile is very different, like a snowflake," said Scott Rinaberger, the founder of the Smiley Face Cookie Company in St. Louis.
The bakery received a cease and desist letter from Pennsylvania in early 2016, but it was disregarded. A smiley face cookie they started baking in the 70s became the icon for the bakery's adults with disabilities job program in 2021.
"We pretty much kind of ignored that letter and just thought, 'Hey, we have precedence, so we can keep making these cookies,'" Rinaberger said. "We received a second one in 2022, never heard from the trademark owners until recently when we received an email following up from their attorneys asking what our action plans were to stop calling them smiley cookies."
In a statement to 5 On Your Side, Pennsylvania's Eat'nPark management said they own the federally registered trademarks for Smiley as it relates to cookies, and for the iconic Smiley Face design they've been using on cookies since the 1980s.
What the St. Louis company is worried about most is losing the recognition of seeing Smiley Face Cookie Company in local stores.
"One of the areas that we think we have precedence, besides us doing it before they had their trademark, is it's becoming quite generic and there are hundreds of bakeries around the United States making smile cookies and calling them either smiley face cookies or smile cookies," Rinaberger said.
And for those reasons, they aren't going to let Smiley Face Cookie Company crumble. There is a GoFundMe set up to help with the Smiley Face Cookie Company's legal expenses.
An Eat'nPark spokesperson sent the following statement to 5 On Your Side:
"McArthur’s Bakery is doing important and meaningful work, and we respect their mission. For some time, however, we had reached out to McArthur’s Bakery to engage in a conversation about our trademarks. Unfortunately, they ignored our outreach and our efforts to initiate good-faith conversations.
"We are not seeking to profit from an agreement with McArthur’s Bakery or to stop their good work; we simply want to do what’s required by the law to uphold our trademarks. We have numerous licensing agreements in place across the country as a result of similar conversations we’ve had with many businesses since earning our trademarks.
"Eat’n Park® has owned federally registered trademarks for the word mark Smiley® as it relates to cookies and for our iconic Smiley Face design since we began serving Smiley® Cookies in Eat’n Park® restaurants in the 1980s. To maintain our trademarks, we are required to defend our rights by preventing third parties from using these trademarks. We make every effort to engage in direct conversations to resolve these issues without taking legal action.
"We look forward to working with McArthur’s Bakery so we can move forward in a way that allows them to continue to sell their products and fulfill their fantastic mission."
