Smucker’s most valuable trademark has no name and no logo. It’s round, crimped, and frozen. A federal judge just said the case over it can move forward.
Allen Adamson is Co-Founder of Metaforce, Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern School of Business, and an expert witness in trademark, branding, and consumer perception disputes.
This column examines what the Smucker v. Trader Joe’s Uncrustables lawsuit reveals about product-shape trademarks, trade dress, brand equity, and consumer perception.
Originally published September 12, 2026 in World Trademark Review.
The most contested product shape in America right now belongs to a frozen sandwich. Last fall, J.M. Smucker sued Trader Joe’s in federal court in Ohio over crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that look, Smucker says, too much like Uncrustables. Same round silhouette. Same crimped edge. Packaging in familiar colors, complete with a photograph of a sandwich missing one bite. Trader Joe’s asked the judge to throw the case out. On Friday, he declined.
Along the way, Trader Joe’s offered the most memorable defense of the year. Its sandwich is not round, the company told the court. It is a squircle. A square with rounded corners. And the crimped edge is not branding, the company argued, just engineering. The crimp keeps the filling inside, and nobody should get to own the way a sandwich stays shut.
It is a clever argument. But you only debate geometry when the real fight is about value. The question underneath this case is one every brand owner is living with: when does investment in a design become an asset the law will recognize and protect?
Equity moved off the label years ago
Brands stopped differentiating by putting a logo on a box a generation ago. Cover the logo and consumers still recognize Apple, from the packaging to the store to the screen. The goal of modern brand building is an ownable experience across the entire customer journey. Which means the equity increasingly lives in places trademark registers were never designed to hold. Shapes. Colors. Textures. Rituals. Uncrustables is the extreme case: a brand whose equity lives almost entirely in the form of the product. The name barely matters at the point of consumption. The bag gets thrown away. What a kid recognizes from across the cafeteria is the silhouette. Round, sealed, crimped, no crust. Smucker spent more than twenty years teaching America that this shape means one thing. The product is the logo.
Why the traditional lens cannot see the theft
Look at this case through the usual confusion framework and it nearly disappears. Trader Joe’s says the crimp does a job, and useful features belong to everyone. But there are many ways to close a sandwich, and Smucker chose one, made it distinctive, and invested until shoppers read that crimped edge as a signature. The crimp still seals the sandwich. Its main job now is telling you who made it.
And nobody is confused at Trader Joe’s. It may be the one store brand in America stronger than most of the brands it borrows from. Shoppers drive past three other supermarkets to buy the house version, knowing exactly who made it. So if no one is fooled, but the borrowed shape still does the selling, what exactly has been taken? Meaning. Twenty years of lunchbox associations, transferred to a competing freezer at no charge. The confusion test was never built to price that.
What the judge actually recognized
That is why the most important part of Friday’s ruling is not that the case survived, but how. The judge pointed to the significant resources Smucker devoted over two decades to building Uncrustables and protecting it, and to the association customers now make between the design and the brand. In plain terms, the court recognized the title deed. Courts are increasingly being asked to treat investment-backed design equity as a protectable asset in its own right, and this reasoning reads like a court willing to try. The ruling does not decide who wins. It decides the shape is property worth fighting over.
Building equity a court can eventually see
For brand owners, the practical question is what that investment has to look like. Four behaviors matter. First, choose design decisions that are not the category default and not purely doing a job. Trader Joe’s entire defense is that the crimp is engineering; the more a design element is only functional, the less it can ever belong to you. Second, make the design the hero of the marketing, not just the name. Smucker put the sandwich with the bite taken out on the box. If your advertising never features the shape, do not expect anyone to believe the shape carries the brand. Third, be consistent for a long time, and be careful what you redesign away. Part of Trader Joe’s defense is that Smucker’s current packaging dates only to 2024 and is not yet famous. Refresh the pack, restart the clock. Fourth, keep the receipts. The judge’s reasoning was about resources invested over decades. Track the spending behind the design, the development history, and recognition with the logo removed. If the equity is real, it should be measurable, and someday you may need to show the measurement.
If a shape can be owned, a shape can collect rent. The harder question is no longer whether courts will see design equity. It is whether you are building the kind a court could recognize and documenting it well enough to prove the value was yours before someone else borrows it.
