Soft drinks company Robinsons is the latest UK brand owner to challenge Aldi over allegations of ‘copycat’ products.

As reported widely in the UK grocery media, including this story in The Grocer, the UK soft drinks brand Robinsons, owned by Britvic PLC, filed a claim in the High Court on 19 March 2025, accusing the discounter of trademark infringement and passing off.

At the moment, full details of the filing are not available; but legals experts believe it relates to alleged similarities between Aldi’s Sun Quench Squirty Squash and Robinsons’ Mini.

Kirsten Gilbert, Partner and Head of Brand Exploitation, Protection, and Trade Mark Litigation at law firm Marks & Clerk, was quoted in a number of media outlets saying: “We do not know what the claim is about, but can’t help but notice certain similarities with the get-up of the well-known Robinsons brand squash and the Aldi product sold under the Sun Quench brand… This may be the first of several cases we see where the boundaries of this new shift in power are tested. It will be interesting for brand owners to see what happens in this new case against Aldi and the extent to which trademark registrations for the get-up of products can protect against lookalikes in the UK.”

The ’shift in power’ Gilbert is referring to relates to a big court win by Cider company Thatchers against Aldi in the UK Appeals Court in January 2025, which saw Thatchers win its claim for trade mark infringement over similarities in the packaging of its cloudy lemon cider drink and Aldi’s Taurus product.

A year earlier, in January 2024, Aldi had been victorious when an Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) judge had found that there was a low degree of similarity between Thatchers' mark and Aldi's product, meaning that there was no real likelihood of confusion.

The 2025 Appeals Court found the IPEC ruling was flawed. Notably, the judgement, drafted by Lord Justice Arnold, made much of the fact that Aldi gave its design company the Thatchers imagery to use as a reference point and suggested “close imitation”.

The judgement goes on: “The inescapable conclusion is that Aldi intended the Sign to remind consumers of the Trade Mark. This can only have been in order to convey the message that the Aldi Product was like the Thatchers Product, only cheaper. To that extent, Aldi intended to take advantage of the reputation of the Trade Mark in order to assist it to sell the Aldi Product.”

However, Aldi has now filed an appeal in the Thatchers case to the UK Supreme Court, so this story may not yet be finished.