Hotel Chocolat has opened a new front in its chocolate war with Waitrose, issuing a legal threat and offering customers an “amnesty” on the supermarket’s alleged copycat bars.
The upmarket chocolatier is inviting anyone who has bought one of Waitrose’s sugar-heavy £2 bars to exchange it for a £3.95 Hotel Chocolat slab, which lists cocoa as the primary component.
Hotel Chocolat has also increased the pressure on Waitrose by instructing its lawyers to write to the supermarket demanding that it removes its bars from sale by the end of today and destroy them.
The developments escalate a plagiarism dispute that began when the Hotel Chocolat co-founder Angus Thirlwell accused Waitrose last week of copying his flagship range of curvy chocolate “slabs”.
Under the terms of the chocolate amnesty, customers cannot have eaten all of the Waitrose bar and simply present Hotel Chocolat shop staff with an empty wrapper.
To receive a free Hotel Chocolat slab, they must hand over the Waitrose version either uneaten or unfinished, at any time between now and the end of this weekend. Multiple bar swaps are not permitted.
“We’re having a ‘Slabgate’ amnesty as a lot of people will have bought them thinking they’re Hotel Chocolat quality, taken a couple of mouthfuls and realised they’re actually stuffed full of sugar,” Thirlwell said.
“People won’t be happy and the point of chocolate is to make people happy, so the most straightforward thing we can do is invite people to bring a half-eaten bar in and get a free upgrade. We’ll drop the copycat product in the bin.”
Thirlwell decided to escalate matters after waiting in vain for a response from Waitrose for a week, despite urging the company’s executives to “do the right thing” last Friday.
He has yet to receive a response from the supermarket, even though the John Lewis-owned grocer said last week that it “take[s] the intellectual property rights of other businesses extremely seriously”.
The Guardian approached Waitrose for a comment on how and when it intends to respond to Thirlwell but had not received a response at the time of publication.
“We’re really surprised at the slow response, it’s not what we were expecting, given their brand values and the clarity of the situation,” Thirlwell said.
“Every hour that it goes on, we’re worried about the brand damage. John Lewis has profited from our slabs by selling them in its shops. Then their sister company is trying to tear our brand down with a cheap knock-off.
“If another company is misleading the market then we require stock to be removed and destroyed. We will defend our intellectual property and there are a wide range of options available to do that. None are being taken off the table.
“The deadline is later today but we haven’t got very high expectations of a satisfactory response.”
Hotel Chocolat customers began asking whether the company was making chocolate under contract for Waitrose last week after spotting the similarity between the two companies’ products.
All the Waitrose bars are roughly the same size as Hotel Chocolat’s and share a distinctive wavy edge that sets them apart from mass-produced bars with straight sides.
One of the Waitrose bars – made of white chocolate with studs of meringue and strawberry pieces and named Eton mess after the famous pudding – is a combination almost identical to Hotel Chocolat’s concoction of the same name.
Waitrose’s caramel crunch bar also shares several characteristics with Hotel Chocolat’s Caramel & Co offering, while orange and coffee-flavoured iterations echo products that the chocolatier has discontinued.
Thirlwell said Hotel Chocolat had legal protection for its curved-edge design from the European Union’s intellectual property office.
“It’s inspired by what happens when you pour molten chocolate out on to a chocolatier’s marble tabletop because it spreads into a lovely curvy outline,” he said.