You named the restaurant. Designed the logo. Printed the menus. Then someone — your CA, a friend who's been through it — asks the question: "Did you trademark the name?" You file in Class 43, because that's the restaurant class, and you get back to the hundred other fires.

A year later your peri-peri mayo is outselling your tables. You start bottling it. A delivery aggregator lists it. And that's when you learn the thing nobody mentioned at the start: in trademark law, your restaurant and your mayo are two different businesses.

Trademarks live in classes, not in the abstract

One paragraph of theory, because everything else hangs off it. A trademark doesn't protect a name floating in space. It protects a name inside a class — one of 45, set by the NICE Classification that India follows. (Our class search guide walks through all 45 in plain English.) Classes 1 to 34 cover goods: things you can hold, pack, ship. Classes 35 to 45 cover services: things done for you. Your registration lives where you file it. Step outside that class and you're standing in the open — even with the identical name, even with the identical logo.

Think of each class as a separate plot of land. Owning one doesn't fence the next. That's the whole game.

Class 43: the dining room

Class 43 covers services for providing food and drink. Restaurants, cafés, cloud kitchens, catering, canteens, food delivery services — if customers pay you for the experience of being fed, whether at a white-tablecloth table, a cloud-kitchen counter, or through an app with your name on the bag, that's 43.

A question I get constantly: "My kitchen is delivery-only — is that still 43?" Yes. There is no separate class for restaurants without chairs. The service is the preparation and provision of food to order. The chairs were never the point.

Class 30: the grocery shelf

Class 30 is the goods side of your business: coffee, tea, spices, sauces, condiments, bakery mixes, ready-to-eat packs, noodles, chocolates. The test is simple — if the customer takes it home in your packaging and consumes it later, it's a product, and products live in the goods classes.

Your filter-coffee powder: 30. The biryani masala you started selling on your website: 30. The bottled cold brew in the café fridge: 30, even though it's sold on your premises — because the customer buys it as a packaged good, not as a served beverage.

The packaging-vs-premises test

Here's the rule of thumb I give every food founder, and it has never failed: consumed on your premises or through your service — 43. Taken home in your packaging — 30. Same brand, two legal territories. Same building, two different plots.

Where founders trip is the middle ground. A thali served at the table: 43. The same thali as a frozen ready-meal in a supermarket: 30. The recipe didn't change. The legal category did — because the law classifies what the customer buys, not what the chef cooked.

What goes wrong when you file only 43

The standard story: file in 43 at launch, build the brand for two years, launch the packaged line, assume the trademark stretches. It doesn't. A competitor — sometimes a former distributor who knows exactly how well your masala sells — files your identical name in Class 30. The Registry grants it. As far as the register is concerned, nobody owns that name for packaged food, because nobody does.

Undoing that means an opposition or a rectification petition: months of procedure, evidence, hearings — and a bill that makes the second class fee look like pocket change. At e-filing rates, a class costs ₹9,000 for most companies (₹4,500 if you're a recognised startup or small enterprise). The fight costs multiples of that, and you might lose.

I've watched founders try to argue "but it's the same brand" before the Registrar. The Registrar is sympathetic and unmoved. The register is class-wise. That's the beginning and the end of it.

The franchise wrinkle

If you ever franchise — or take investor money with franchising in the deck — this doubles in importance. Your franchisees operate in 43. But the central kitchen supplying proprietary gravies, the merchandise, the packaged SKUs sold under the brand: those sit in 30 (and sometimes 29 or 32, depending on the product). During diligence, investors' lawyers check the class coverage. A brand with only half its classes filed reads as a brand with half its homework done, and it becomes a negotiating point you don't want.

What to actually file

The practical playbook, in order:

File the word mark first. The name in plain text, no styling. A word mark protects the name itself, in any font, any colour, any logo iteration. Logos can come later; the name is the asset.

File 43 for the restaurant service. Always. That's the core.

File 30 if you sell — or genuinely plan to sell within a couple of years — packaged food under the brand. "Genuinely plan" matters: you file on the basis of use or honest intent to use, not fantasy. But if the D2C line is on the roadmap, file now. Classes get crowded fast in food.

Write the specification in the class's own language. "Restaurant services" sails through. Vague phrases like "food-related services" draw examination objections, and objections cost time. The class headings exist — use their vocabulary.

Search before you file. The number of founders who discover a conflicting mark after paying the fee would surprise you. A proper availability search — identical and similar marks, in both classes — takes a day and saves months. Start with our trademark class finder to confirm which classes your menu and packaged line actually sit in.

One application (TM-A) can cover both classes — see our guide to multi-class vs single-class filing for when that's worth it; you pay the government fee per class, not per application. There's no paperwork penalty for filing smart.

Your restaurant and your mayo are two businesses wearing one name. File like it. And if you're standing at the fork — opening the doors, bottling the sauce, signing the franchise LOI — get the class call right before the brand gets valuable. Our team files food-brand trademarks every week; talk to us before you file, not after the objection arrives.