Dr Robert James Kalibala founded a food import business called Orgacado Ltd in February 2018. The company specializes in growing and importing organic large soft-skin avocados and other tropical fruits and vegetables from parts of Africa into the United Kingdom.
According to Kalibala, his business name means “organic avocado” or “big avocado” in Uganda and has nothing to do with the delivery company Ocado. “I came up with the name because my focus was the avocado. With my native people and in Nigeria something big is called ‘oga’, so I said let me call it ‘oga avocado’, meaning big avocado or organic avocado. So I got those two names to add them together to make Orgacado.”
Dr Kalibala successfully registered his business with Companies House and agricultural bodies like the Soil Association, but was not initially aware that he needed a trademark for his company name and logo – until he started receiving letters from Ocado two years ago.
He said: “They just wrote to me before and said ‘stop using our name, that is our name’ then I went on to check if the name belonged to them, when I went onto the Intellectual Property website to register the name, the name was still available.”
“Because they are a big company they are trying to scare me, they are using big law firms, just to intimate me to leave our name, but Orgacado and Ocado are completely different.”
Source: voice-online.co.uk