Nutritional and Supplemental Trademarks
Typical wares in this category include supplements such as Vitamin D, Multi-vitamins, ginseng extracts, formulations to promote special functions, etc.
Health Canada Product Licence
- In order to sell “natural health” products in Canada you must comply with the Food and Drugs Act. For more information see the Health Canada guide.
- This usually means getting a product licence from Health Canada
- Health Canada has a certain way it likes to have products described. CIPO has a different way. You can’t generally use the Health Canada description for the trademark.
Choosing a Good Trademark
- The strongest mark is a made-up word such as Xerox® or Kodak®. The next best is a name that’s a real word, but has nothing to do with the goods or services, such as Apple® for computers or Blackberry® for personal computing devices.
- Choose a mark that is evocative and distinctive, without being descriptive.
- Packaging for these products often includes designs, which may involve a second trademark registration.
Choosing a Bad Trademark
- Make it clearly descriptive: For example, let’s assume that you wanted to trademark a new line of garlic extract and call it GARLIC EXTRACT. It would likely be refused as being clearly descriptive.
- Make it confusingly similar to another trademark, so as to either improve your business or devalue another business: This makes for a bad trademark and possible law suits.
