Halloumi: The Cheese That Nearly Lost Its Name

Cyprus did not lose the halloumi trademark in Britain in a courtroom. It lost it in an in-tray. The most valuable assets a business owns are frequently the ones nobody has been made responsible for.

On 9 February 2018, a letter arrived at the Ministry of Energy, Commerce and Tourism in Nicosia. It was passed from one official to another. Nobody acted on it.

Inside were three applications, filed by a British company called John & Pascalis Ltd, to revoke and invalidate the United Kingdom trademark for the word halloumi. The UK Intellectual Property Office had set the standard deadline of two months for a response. The deadline passed without one. By May 2018, the trademark that Cyprus had first applied for in 1990 and secured in 2002 no longer belonged to Cyprus.

There is a version of this story that is simply about bureaucratic embarrassment, and it was told at length at the time. There is a more useful version, which is that one of the most valuable commercial assets the Republic owned was lost through a housekeeping decision taken seven years earlier, by people who had no idea that was what they were doing.

What the halloumi trademark was worth

It helps to be precise about the stakes, because they were not symbolic. Halloumi is Cyprus's flagship export product. The commerce ministry reported exports reaching 195 million euros in 2018, with the United Kingdom taking roughly 40 per cent of the total, making it comfortably the largest single market for the cheese.

A trademark in that market is not a decoration. It is the mechanism that prevents a producer in another country from putting the word halloumi on a package of something else and selling it alongside the real thing. Losing it meant that, for a period, the protection standing between Cypriot producers and imitation in their biggest export market simply was not there.

The decision that caused it, seven years earlier

The chain of events did not begin in 2018. It began in 2011.

Until then, the international law firm Clifford Chance was recorded with the UK Intellectual Property Office as the Ministry's trademark representative, and the firm's UK office was the registered address for service, meaning the address to which the registry sends official correspondence. In 2011, the Ministry changed that address for service to its own offices in Nicosia.

On the face of it, this is an administrative tidying exercise of the kind organisations carry out constantly, and it saves money. In practice, it moved the point at which official notices landed from a firm whose entire business is monitoring such notices to a government department where, as the High Court would later observe, internal procedures were disorganised enough that an envelope could circulate between officials without anyone taking action.

IN PLAIN TERMS

A registered trademark is not a permanent grant. It is a right that has to be renewed on a fixed cycle, defended when it is challenged, and above all kept reachable. Every register holds an address for service: the single address to which official notices, deadlines and challenges are sent. If that address stops being monitored, the notices are still treated as delivered, and the deadlines still run.

Why it could not simply be undone

When the error came to light, the Ministry acted quickly. Clifford Chance were re-engaged and an appeal was launched, essentially asking for the deadline to be extended so that the paperwork could be filed late. In the circumstances it was a reasonable request. The mistake was obvious, the consequences were disproportionate, and no one seriously disputed that Cyprus had a legitimate claim to the name.

The UK High Court dismissed the appeal. The reasoning, in the judgment reported as Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Energy, Commerce and Tourism, Republic of Cyprus v John & Pascalis Limited, was procedural rather than moral: a registry cannot function if final decisions are not treated as final, and cannot be expected to reopen them by administrative action whenever a party explains why it missed a deadline.

That is the part worth carrying into any other business. The system that protects intellectual property is built on deadlines, and deadlines only work if they bind the sympathetic cases as well as the careless ones. The strength of a claim is not a defence against having missed the date on which it had to be asserted.

The trademark was eventually re-registered in the United Kingdom on 31 January 2020. Cyprus had been without protection for its most important export brand, in its most important market, for the best part of two years.

Meanwhile, on a second front

While that was unfolding, a longer and slower process was running in parallel, and it is instructive for a different reason.

Cyprus filed to register halloumi as a Protected Designation of Origin with its own authorities in 2012, and the application reached the European Commission in 2014. A PDO is a stronger protection than a trademark: it ties a product name to a defined geographical area and a specified method of production, so that only cheese made in Cyprus, to the stated recipe, may lawfully carry the name.

It took until 12 April 2021 for the Commission to register it. Seventeen oppositions had been lodged at EU level, nine of which were substantiated. And when the registration finally arrived, it was challenged in the General Court of the European Union, in an action dismissed in its entirety on 21 February 2024.

The detail worth pausing on is who brought that challenge. It was not a foreign competitor. It was a group of Cypriot dairies, objecting to the ratio of sheep and goat milk to cow's milk that the protected specification required, on the basis that meeting it would constrain their production and their exports. A protection intended to defend a national product was contested by the producers it was written to defend, which is an unusual thing for a PDO case and a reminder that a definition which protects an asset also constrains how it may be used.

Where this risk actually sits

Very few businesses own a national food product. A great many own something that behaves the same way: a brand, a mark, a domain, a design, a piece of software, a recipe or a licensed process that is genuinely material to revenue and is nobody's explicit responsibility to maintain.

WHERE THE EXPOSURE SITS

• Registrations held in several jurisdictions, each with its own renewal cycle, deadlines and language of correspondence

• An address for service pointing at a former adviser, a general office inbox, or a person who has since left

• A brand that is material to revenue but appears nowhere in the accounts, so nobody reviews it annually

• Renewal dates held by one individual, in one diary, with no deputy and no system behind them

WHAT PROTECTION LOOKS LIKE

• A single register of every mark, in every territory, with owner, class, renewal date and address for service recorded

• A professional representative on record whose address is monitored, with confirmed receipt of official notices

• A named internal owner, with cover, rather than an assumption that somebody is watching

• The portfolio reviewed on the same cycle as the statutory accounts, so it is seen at least once a year

The failure mode in the halloumi case was not legal. Nobody lost an argument about who owned the name. The failure was administrative, and it was invisible right up until the moment it was expensive, which is what makes it worth writing about rather than simply noting.

Why the accounts do not help you here

There is a reporting dimension to this that is easy to miss. Under normal accounting treatment, internally generated brands are not recognised as assets on the balance sheet. A trademark a business built itself, however valuable it has become, generally appears nowhere in its financial statements, whereas one it purchased from somebody else does.

The consequence is practical rather than technical. Assets that appear in the accounts get reviewed, because the audit process obliges someone to look at them once a year. Assets that appear nowhere are reviewed only if somebody has been made responsible for reviewing them. The most valuable thing a business owns can therefore be the one item in it that no annual process ever touches.

What to check

None of the following requires a legal budget or a specialist. All of it can be done in an afternoon, and it is the kind of work that only ever looks unnecessary in advance.

• List what you actually hold. Every mark, in every territory, with the class, the owner entity, the renewal date and the recorded address for service. Most businesses discover during this exercise that at least one entry is not what they assumed.

• Check where official post goes. Confirm the address for service on each register, and confirm that whoever sits at that address knows they are the monitoring point. This single check is the one that would have prevented the entire halloumi episode.

• Confirm the owner entity is still the right one. Marks registered to a company that has since been restructured, renamed or dissolved are a common and quietly serious problem, particularly after a group reorganisation.

• Give it a named owner and an annual slot. Attach the review to something that already happens each year, such as the statutory accounts, so that it is carried by a process rather than by somebody's memory.

The practical takeaway

Cyprus did eventually win. The trademark was restored, the PDO was registered, and the challenge to it failed. The name is now more thoroughly protected than it has ever been, and the episode has become a case study taught to trainee lawyers.

But it is worth remembering how close it came, and how ordinary the cause was. Not a hostile takeover, not a clever legal manoeuvre by a competitor, not a failure of the underlying claim. A change of postal address, made for sensible reasons by people doing their jobs, and an envelope that nobody opened in time.

Intellectual property is not lost dramatically. It expires quietly, on a date that was in somebody's diary, or should have been.