Meat sounding: can I call it meat if it isn’t meat?

Meat sounding and deceptiveness

To truly understand what is at stake with meat sounding, it is necessary to step back and recall how the law has traditionally dealt with deception in commercial language. In trademark law, for instance, there has long been a clear principle: a sign cannot be used — nor even registered – if it is “liable to mislead the public” as to the nature, quality, or characteristics of the product. This is the logic of deceptiveness, expressly provided for by the Italian Industrial Property Code (Article 14) and echoed in EU trademark law.

However, this approach does not operate automatically. It is not enough that a word recalls a certain imagery: what matters is whether, in the concrete way it is used, that word can actually lead consumers to misunderstand. Deceptiveness is therefore a contextual category, requiring consideration of the overall message, the packaging, the information provided, and the type of public addressed.

The concept of meat sounding, as it is emerging in the most recent European debate, seems to move on a different level. The direction accompanying the amendments to Regulation 1308/2013 points toward a stricter model, tending to prohibit the use of the term “meat” or similar expressions for products that contain none, even where labeling or communication may in practice be transparent. The EU’s approach appears aimed at limiting certain expressions because of their evocative force, rather than their actual ability to deceive.

Thus, we move from a circumstance-based approach – typical of deceptiveness – to a more prescriptive approach, in which certain words become problematic in themselves, almost as if they were reserved by definition for a specific supply chain. This is a significant shift, because it turns food language into an area less reliant on concrete assessments of consumer confusion and increasingly governed through preventive bans tied solely to semantic associations.

The “Seafood Cold Cuts” case: descriptive use vs. misleading use

It is against this backdrop that the decision of the Florence Court of 25 November 2025 becomes particularly relevant. The dispute arose from the initiative of the owner of the trademarks “Salumi di mare” (“seafood cold cuts”) and “Salumeria ittica,” as well as the related domain names. The claimant complained about the unauthorized use of the expression “salumi di mare” by a third company to promote and sell similar food products through its website and social media channels. In particular, the claimants referred to the use of the hashtag “salumidimare” on Instagram and the presentation of a franchising project in which the defendant described its mission as offering a tasting experience of fish transformed into “seafood cold cuts.”

The Court, while acknowledging the ownership of the signs by the claimants, nevertheless excluded that the defendant’s conduct amounted to trademark infringement or unfair competition. The central point of the reasoning was that the expression “salumi di mare” had indeed been used, but not as a trademark – that is, not as a distinctive sign identifying the commercial origin of the products – but rather as a descriptive phrase indicating the type of goods offered and the processing technique applied to fish.

According to the judge, the defendant had merely used two common words – “cold cuts” and “sea” – to describe a method of preparation and preservation, without presenting them as an indicator of commercial origin.

For this reason, mere conceptual similarity with the registered trademark was not considered sufficient: granting the claimants a monopoly over such a lexical combination would have meant preventing the use of common terms necessary to describe products and food techniques. In the absence of distinctive use and lacking elements capable of confusing the public, the Court rejected the claims.

The ruling is particularly interesting because it intervenes at a time when the European debate on meat sounding is still evolving: the amendments to Regulation 1308/2013 have not yet entered into force, and the judgment remains anchored, under the current legal framework, to a concrete evaluation of linguistic use and its actual misleading potential.

An evolving scenario: between market and regulation

The Florence Court’s decision highlights a growing distance between two different ways of looking at food language. On the one hand, the judicial approach remains rooted in a concrete assessment of commercial communication: what matters is the consumer’s real perception, the informative function of the expression used, and the absence of an actual risk of confusion. In this perspective, the judge recognizes some space — albeit limited — for lexical creativity, provided it is transparent and consistent with the nature of the product.

On the other hand, the European regulatory evolution on meat sounding seems oriented toward a more preventive logic, aimed at restricting the use of denominations traditionally associated with meat, in order to avoid linguistic ambiguity.

Between the two lies a rapidly transforming market, which innovates and experiments and inevitably needs new words to describe products that do not fit into traditional categories. Expressions such as “salumi di mare” live precisely in this intermediate semantic zone.

It will therefore be important to observe how the European regulatory framework consolidates and how much space will be left, in the future, for context-based evaluations grounded in consumers’ actual perception, rather than criteria based exclusively on language.