The legal dispute between Taco John’s and Taco Bell over the trademarked phrase “Taco Tuesday” is over. The regional chain has announced that it will abandon the trademark since it’s not worth the legal fees to fight over it. Taco John’s had the phrase trademarked in every state except New Jersey for 34 years.
Taco Bell set out to challenge this, claiming it as commonly used phrase. So it “should be freely available to all who make, sell, eat and celebrate tacos.”
“We’ve always prided ourselves on being the home of Taco Tuesday, but paying millions of dollars to lawyers to defend our mark just doesn’t feel like the right thing to do,” Taco John’s CEO Jim Creel said.
This is certainly a shift from the company’s stance when the petition was filed in May. In response, Taco John’s announced a two-week “Taco Tuesday” promotional campaign. “I’d like to thank our worthy competitors at Taco Bell for reminding everyone that Taco Tuesday is best celebrated at Taco John’s,” Creel said in a statement. “We love celebrating Taco Tuesday with taco lovers everywhere, and we even want to offer a special invitation to fans of Taco Bell to liberate themselves by coming by to see how flavorful and bold tacos can be at Taco John’s all month long.”
While we can appreciate that level of petty. The writing was already on the wall for Taco John’s to lose the trademark. In 2019 NBA star LeBron James filed for his own trademark on “Taco Tuesday,” to prove a point. His filing was dismissed because “the applied-for mark is a commonplace term, message, or expression widely used by a variety of sources that merely conveys an ordinary, familiar, well-recognized concept or sentiment message,” per the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
But this was really just a calculated legal move by James to prove, in court, that this was a common term. And common term’s cannot be trademarked, at all. This ruling gave Taco Bell a much better foothold for its own lawsuit. Taco John’s decision to bow out was the most logical one, odds are they would have dumped millions into legal fees only to lose the trademark anyway.
As a gesture of goodwill over the loss, Creel has pledged the company will donate $40,000, roughly $100 per location, to Children of Restaurant Employees (CORE). CORE is a nonprofit organization that “supports restaurant workers with children by providing financial relief when either the employee, spouse or a child faces a life-altering health crisis, injury, death or natural disaster,” Taco John’s explained in a statement.
