Swiss Federal Court upholds ban on Mexican food brand Bimbo’s trademark

The judges in Lausanne stated that the term "bimbo" is "a highly discriminatory insult towards people of colour." Keystone / Vallauri Nicolas

The Mexican food company Bimbo has been barred from registering its trademark “Bimbo QSR” in Switzerland.

The Federal Court upheld the decision of the Federal Administrative Court and the Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI), citing the term’s discriminatory connotations in German.

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In its ruling, the Federal Court highlighted that under Swiss law, a trademark registration can be refused or invalidated if it violates good morals or public order. Names or signs with content deemed racist are considered to violate these standards.

In their verdict published on Friday, the judges in Lausanne upheld the Federal Administrative Court’s decision from last May. They stated that the term “bimbo” is “a highly discriminatory insult towards people of colour.”

What does “bimbo” mean?

The appellant, based in Mexico, argued that the word “bimbo” lacks a fixed meaning and is interpreted differently among German speakers. In German, it can refer to a “subordinate” or an attractive but not very intelligent woman. In Italian, the word means “child”.

The food group also argued that the lower court relied on evidence irrelevant to Switzerland and therefore should not have been considered. The appellant cited German dictionaries like duden.de, which are tailored to linguistic understanding in Germany but are not suitable for determining the Swiss meaning of the word “bimbo”.

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The Federal Court countered that this argument is flawed, as it dismisses the relevance of such online dictionaries for the Swiss-German linguistic area solely based on their domain name extension. These dictionaries do not define linguistic regions but rather allocate web pages to specific countries.

“Bimbo” deemed a discriminatory expression

Furthermore, the Federal Court noted that dictionaries like Duden draw on a large corpus of texts, including Swiss publications. In this instance, the online version of the dictionary assigns a derogatory meaning towards people of colour to the word “bimbo”.

The judges argued that this entry does not indicate a different meaning of the word in Switzerland or Austria. The dictionary implicitly assumes the term is used uniformly across the German-speaking region.

The IPI had provisionally rejected the trademark registration application when it was filed in late 2018. This refusal was confirmed in a decision made in July 2023.

The Mexican group Bimbo, specialising in bakery products, is one of the world’s largest food producers, employing nearly 140,000 people.

Translated from French by DeepL/sp

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