David Chang and his Momofuku company have been criticized for sending cease-and-desist letters to companies who use his trademarked term "chile crunch." In March, when Momofuku’s lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to stop manufacturers from using the name of celebrity chef David Chang’s popular “chili crunch” condiment, they were doing what trademark lawyers always do: trying to protect a company’s investment from competitors.
“We’re not going to do anything that everyone else is doing,” Chang said in the podcast. “It’s gotta be our story, and our story is not our story. Our story is going to be a blending of all these other stories that we’reAs such, Momofuku argues in its statement, the company wanted to create a name that “we could own and intentionally picked ‘Chili Crunch’ to further differentiate it from the broader chili crisp category, reflecting the uniqueness of Chili Crunch.
“I could have maybe chosen ‘chili crisp,’” Tew told The Post. “But to me ‘crunch’ was more descriptive of what the product is because it didn’t have a lot of oil in it.”The growing popularity of Momofuku’s product was not why either MìLà or Homiah landed on the term “chili crunch,” say their founders, who both also say the term is not distinctive enough for a trademark.“If you spend a lot of time developing ...
Duke University law professor Jennifer Jenkins was skeptical that, on its own, Momofuku’s more recent trademark application for “chili crunch” would succeed. “There is no secondary meaning connecting it to a single producer,” Jenkins said. “When I see ‘chili crunch’ on a jar, it tells me what’s in the jar, not who produced it.
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