More than 100 cereal boxes of the UK version of Weet-Bix – Weetabix – will be destroyed after a court found a New Zealand specialty store had breached the Fair Trading Act.

Sanitarium-owned Weet-Bix commenced legal action against Weetabix Limited earlier this year in a bid to protect its brand, claiming the name similarity could lead to consumers mistaking Weetabix for its product.

It argued that substituting an “a” for a hyphen hardly changed the trademark.

A Little Bit of Britain, which imports Weetabix to sell in its Christchurch specialty store, was caught up in the dispute and had a shipment of 108 boxes of Weetabix seized by NZ customs.

While the court found that there was no chance that consumers would confuse the two brands because it was only being sold at a specialty store, it ruled that the name does breach the Trade Marks Act.

Both brands were developed by Australian Bennison Osborne in the mid-1920s, with the UK version launched shortly after the original Australian breakfast cereal.

The seized cereal boxes were ordered to be destroyed and the store will be required to cover the Weetabix label if it intended to sell the cereal in the future.

Business owner Lisa Wilson told Radio NZ that they would continue selling Weetabix and are anticipating a surge in consumer demand for the product following the 18-month dispute.

“Normally we sell a pallet a month and I thought, crikey, we might need to get two or three just for the first month [to] clear the backlog. But I’m sure with it being gone for a year and a half that it is definitely going to be the best seller for the next while anyway,” she told Radio NZ.

The New Daily has contacted Sanitarium, Weetabix and A Little Bit of Britain for comment.