Same Words, New Order: A $15.4 Million Lesson in Likelihood of Confusion

Case: Sonate Corp. v. Beyond Meat, Inc., No. 1:23-cv-10690-IT
Court: U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts
Decision: Memorandum and Order on post-trial motions, September 18, 2026 (ECF No. 455)
Marks: Registered slogan WHERE GREAT TASTE IS PLANT BASED vs. taglines PLANT BASED GREAT TASTE and GREAT TASTE PLANT BASED
Result: Jury verdict of willful infringement; judgment of $37,500 in actual damages plus $15.4 million of Beyond's profits

In short

A federal jury found that Beyond Meat's taglines PLANT BASED GREAT TASTE and GREAT TASTE PLANT BASED willfully infringed a small company's registered slogan, WHERE GREAT TASTE IS PLANT BASED, even though neither tagline was identical to it. Beyond had found the registration in 2019 and kept using the taglines, and the court has ruled that Sonate is entitled to $15.4 million of Beyond's profits plus $37,500 in damages. The legal test is whether consumers are likely to be confused, not whether the marks match exactly, so rearranging words, dropping a few, or adding your own brand name may not be enough. If the name you want is close to one already in use, a clearance review before launch is the time to find out.

Most of the trademark questions I hear start with some version of the same idea: my name isn't exactly the same as theirs, so I should be fine. People propose marks that change a letter, add a word, swap the order, or attach their own company name, and assume the difference protects them.

A recent decision out of federal court in Massachusetts is about as clear an illustration as you will find of why that assumption is dangerous. It involves one of the best-known brands in plant-based food, a tiny competitor with a registered slogan, and four ordinary English words.

What happened

Sonate Corporation, which does business as Vegadelphia Foods, sells plant-based meat substitutes. It owns a federal registration for the slogan WHERE GREAT TASTE IS PLANT BASED. Sonate is a very small business. In its best year during the relevant period, its sales were about $121,700, it sold to four customers, and the court found it had spent roughly $20 on marketing over nearly five years, plus a modest per-case allowance to distributors. Mem. & Order 9, 35, 37 n.11.

Beyond Meat began using the tagline PLANT BASED GREAT TASTE in March 2019 and proposed GREAT TASTE PLANT BASED for its partnership with Dunkin' Donuts. Id. at 40. You can see exactly how the three phrases relate below.

The three phrases, word by word

Choose a phrase to see how its words line up against Sonate's registered slogan.

Sonate (Vegadelphia Foods): WHERE GREAT TASTE IS PLANT BASED

The registered slogan. Four of its six words carry the message: great taste, plant based.

Shared by all three phrases Only in Sonate's slogan

Sonate's registered slogan: WHERE GREAT TASTE IS PLANT BASED
Beyond Meat's tagline: PLANT BASED GREAT TASTE
Beyond Meat's tagline with Dunkin': GREAT TASTE PLANT BASED

Neither of Beyond's taglines is identical to Sonate's slogan. One swaps the two halves; the other keeps Sonate's order and simply drops "where" and "is." Both keep the words that do the work.

In mid-2019, a Beyond employee found Sonate's registration. Beyond kept using the taglines anyway, and in early 2020 it applied to register PLANT BASED GREAT TASTE itself. The trademark examining attorney at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused the application in a nonfinal office action for two reasons: likelihood of confusion with Sonate's registered slogan, and descriptiveness. Id. at 40–42.

Timeline

March 2019Beyond begins using PLANT BASED GREAT TASTE.
June 2019Beyond proposes GREAT TASTE PLANT BASED for its Dunkin' Donuts partnership.
June–July 2019A Beyond employee discovers Sonate's registered slogan. Use continues.
Early 2020Beyond applies to register PLANT BASED GREAT TASTE.
May 28, 2020Sonate sends a cease-and-desist letter. Beyond begins pulling the taglines; digital uses change almost immediately, while printed materials take until early 2021 to clear.
June 12, 2020The USPTO refuses Beyond's application, citing likelihood of confusion and descriptiveness.
April 2022Sonate sues.
November 2025After a two-week trial, the jury finds both taglines infringe and that the infringement was willful.
September 18, 2026The court rules on post-trial motions.

The verdict and what survived it

The jury found that both taglines infringed Sonate's mark and that Beyond acted willfully. It awarded $23.5 million in actual damages and recommended that Sonate receive $15.4 million of Beyond's profits. It also found that $109 million of Beyond's profits were attributable to PLANT BASED GREAT TASTE. Id. at 1, 25–26.

After trial, Beyond did not challenge the finding of infringement. Its motion attacked only the damages. Id. at 2. Judge Talwani largely agreed with Beyond on that point, cutting actual damages from $23.5 million to $37,500. Nearly all of the jury's figure rested on a planned expansion venture that never got past draft contracts, and the court found no non-speculative evidence that the infringement, rather than the business partners' concern about Sonate's own lawsuit, ended that venture. Id. at 10–22.

But the court adopted the jury's $15.4 million profits award, so Sonate is entitled to $15,437,500 in total. Id. at 37, 47.

Jury award compared with the court's ruling
Component	Jury	Court
Actual damages	$23,500,000	$37,500
Beyond's profits awarded to Sonate	$15,400,000	$15,400,000
Enhanced damages, additional profits, prejudgment interest	n/a	Denied

Keep the scale in mind. A company with annual sales of about $121,700 is entitled to more than $15 million because a much larger company used a rearrangement of its registered slogan.

Lesson one: confusion does not require identical marks

The Lanham Act has never required a copy to be exact. Infringement of a registered mark covers the use of "any reproduction, counterfeit, copy, or colorable imitation" of the mark where the use "is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive." 15 U.S.C. § 1114(1)(a). The statute defines a "colorable imitation" as any mark that "so resembles a registered mark as to be likely to cause confusion or mistake or to deceive." 15 U.S.C. § 1127. Registration follows the same logic: the USPTO refuses a mark that so resembles a registered mark as to be likely to cause confusion. 15 U.S.C. § 1052(d).

Several well-settled principles explain why small differences rarely save a mark.

Marks are compared as a whole, not side by side. The question is not whether someone holding both marks could tell them apart. It is whether the marks are similar enough in sight, sound, meaning, and overall commercial impression that consumers are likely to be confused about who stands behind the product. See Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure (TMEP) § 1207.01(b).

Rearranging the words is not a safe harbor. The USPTO's own examination manual addresses the point directly: where the main difference between two marks is the order of their elements, and the new order does not change the overall commercial impression, confusion may be likely. TMEP § 1207.01(b)(vii). That is precisely the ground on which the examining attorney refused Beyond's application.

Adding your own brand name may not help. Beyond always displayed its own house mark alongside the tagline. Mem. & Order 36. The jury found infringement anyway.

Actual confusion is not required. The test is likelihood of confusion. Sonate pointed the jury to no instances of actual consumer confusion, and its co-owner testified that he was not aware of any. Id. The jury found infringement anyway, and Beyond did not challenge that finding after trial. Evidence of actual confusion is often persuasive when it exists, but its absence is not fatal, a point courts in the Fifth Circuit (which includes Texas) have long recognized.

How courts in Texas weigh likelihood of confusion

Each federal circuit uses its own list of factors. The Fifth Circuit's "digits of confusion" are:

the type of mark allegedly infringed (how strong or distinctive it is);
the similarity between the two marks;
the similarity of the products or services;
the identity of retail outlets and purchasers;
the identity of advertising media used;
the defendant's intent;
any evidence of actual confusion; and
the degree of care exercised by potential purchasers.

Streamline Prod. Sys., Inc. v. Streamline Mfg., Inc., 851 F.3d 440, 453 (5th Cir. 2017); see also Elvis Presley Enters., Inc. v. Capece, 141 F.3d 188, 194 (5th Cir. 1998) (listing the first seven digits and holding that no one digit is dispositive). No single digit controls, and a court may find confusion likely even when some digits point the other way. Before the USPTO, the analogous factors come from In re E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., 476 F.2d 1357, 1361 (C.C.P.A. 1973).

Lesson two: knowing about the other mark changes the stakes

The jury's willfulness finding rested on what Beyond knew. It discovered Sonate's registration in 2019, kept using its taglines, and later tried to register one of them. The court described Beyond's "insistence on using the infringing marks despite its knowledge of Sonate's registered mark" as "ill-advised." Mem. & Order 43.

Beyond's witnesses testified that they believed the taglines were sufficiently "different" from Sonate's slogan and merely "descriptive," and that Beyond did not want to cause confusion. Id. at 40–41. Those beliefs did not prevent a verdict of willful infringement.

The court was careful about what willfulness did and did not mean here. It found that the evidence showed, at most, that Beyond "acted willfully in using a catchy, trademarked phrase," not that it set out to take Sonate's customers or trade on Sonate's goodwill. Id. at 35. For that reason, the court refused to increase the award. But willfulness still mattered: it was part of the record on which a $15.4 million profits award was built.

The practical point for anyone choosing a name: if a search turns up a registered mark close to yours, you now know about it. Going forward anyway is a decision a court may later examine.

What about dilution?

Dilution is a separate claim, and it is worth understanding because it reaches further than infringement. Under federal law, the owner of a famous mark can stop uses likely to cause dilution by blurring or tarnishment "regardless of the presence or absence of actual or likely confusion, of competition, or of actual economic injury." 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c)(1). In other words, a dilution claim does not depend on confusion at all.

The catch is fame. A mark qualifies only if it is "widely recognized by the general consuming public of the United States" as a source identifier. 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c)(2)(A). That is a household-name standard, and recognition within a niche market is not enough. Texas has its own dilution statute, Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 16.103, which asks whether a mark is widely recognized throughout Texas or in a geographic area of the state. That is a different measure from the national fame the federal statute requires, but the mark must still be famous and distinctive, and a mark that is merely well known to a few customers will not qualify.

Sonate was a likelihood-of-confusion case, not a dilution case, and Sonate's slogan would not have come close to qualifying as famous. The lesson runs the other way: if a small company's slogan can produce an eight-figure judgment on confusion alone, a name that echoes a genuinely famous brand faces both claims at once.

Lesson three: size does not protect the later user

Beyond sold through some 28,000 retail outlets; Sonate sold to four customers. Mem. & Order 37 n.11. None of that disproved infringement. The jury also found that the two companies' products directly competed, a finding the court considered itself bound by because Beyond had not challenged it through the proper post-trial motion. Id. at 27–28. Once direct competition and infringement were established, the burden shifted to Beyond to prove its costs and the limits of the competition. Id. at 29–30.

For a business considering a name close to an existing mark, the takeaway is that the earlier registrant's size is not your defense. A federal registration gives even a very small owner nationwide priority and a credible basis to sue.

A note for mark owners

The case cuts both ways. Sonate won on liability but lost almost all of its $23.5 million damages verdict because it could not tie a speculative future business to the infringement. The court also noted the absence of evidence of actual confusion and of meaningful brand recognition when it refused to award more. Id. at 20–22, 35–36. If you own a mark and believe someone is infringing it, document the harm as it happens, and act promptly; the court also noted the nearly two-year gap between Sonate's demand letter and its lawsuit. Id. at 41.

What this means if you are choosing a name

If the name you want is close to one already in use, especially for similar products or services, expect problems at two stages. At the USPTO, the examining attorney may refuse registration under § 2(d), as happened to Beyond. In the marketplace, the existing owner may sue for infringement, and a registration of your own, if you obtained one, would not necessarily end that fight.

Changing a letter, rearranging words, dropping a word, or adding your company name are the kinds of differences that often fail to change the overall commercial impression. Whether a particular difference is enough depends on the specific marks, goods, and markets involved, which is what a clearance search is designed to assess before you invest in signage, packaging, and advertising.

This decision is from a federal trial court, it does not bind courts in Texas, and it may be appealed. Its value is as an illustration of principles that apply nationwide.

Considering a new name, logo, or slogan? A clearance review before launch is generally far less expensive than a rebrand or a lawsuit after it.

Schedule a strategy call

Sources

Sonate Corp. v. Beyond Meat, Inc., No. 1:23-cv-10690-IT, Mem. & Order, ECF No. 455 (D. Mass. Sept. 18, 2026). Pin cites in this post are to the order's page numbers.
15 U.S.C. §§ 1052(d), 1114(1)(a), 1125(c), 1127.
Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 16.103.
Streamline Prod. Sys., Inc. v. Streamline Mfg., Inc., 851 F.3d 440 (5th Cir. 2017).
Elvis Presley Enters., Inc. v. Capece, 141 F.3d 188 (5th Cir. 1998).
In re E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., 476 F.2d 1357 (C.C.P.A. 1973).
Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure §§ 1207.01(b), 1207.01(b)(vii).

Ortman Law Firm was not involved in this case. This post discusses a public court decision for educational purposes.

Same words, new order: a $15.4 million lesson in likelihood of confusion