Trademark for Restaurants & Cafés in India: Class 43, Franchising and the Second-Outlet Trap

Your first outlet is full on weekends, the name is on everyone's lips, and a franchise enquiry has just landed in your inbox. Then a friend sends you a photo: a café two cities away, same name, same colours, same menu style. You never opened there. Without a trademark, proving that name is yours becomes a fight. With one, it becomes a letter.

The short answer: a restaurant or café in India should file its name as a word mark in Class 43 first, and add the product and retail classes only for what it actually sells or plans to sell. The online government fee for Form TM-A is ₹4,500 per class for individuals, startups and small enterprises, or ₹9,000 per class for other applicants.

What a restaurant trademark actually protects

A trademark protects the signs that tell a customer where the food came from: your outlet name, your logo, and your tagline. It does not protect your recipes, your menu layout, or your interior design. Those belong to other kinds of protection, if they qualify at all. What it gives you is the exclusive right, in the classes you file in, to stop others using an identical or confusingly similar name for similar services.

It also does not replace your food licences. An FSSAI licence says your kitchen is safe to eat from. A trademark says the name above the door belongs to you. One is about safety, the other about identity, and a restaurant needs both for different reasons. Our guide to the FSSAI licence for restaurants and cafés covers the safety side; this guide covers the name.

Class 43 is home — but it is not the whole house

India follows the Nice Classification, a system of 45 classes. Classes 1 to 34 cover goods and 35 to 45 cover services. Class 43 covers services for providing food and drink and temporary accommodation: restaurants, cafés, bars, catering, cloud kitchens and takeaway services. If you serve food at your own outlet, this is your core class.

Here is the idea most owners miss, and it is worth an analogy. A trademark is a key cut for one door. A Class 43 key opens the restaurant-services door. It does not open the packaged-goods door, the retail door, or the delivery-app door. Each of those needs its own key, filed and paid for separately.

So map your business honestly, today and for the next year or two:

Class 43 covers your dine-in, takeaway, café and catering services. Class 30 covers packaged coffee, tea, bakery goods, sauces, spices and snacks sold under your name. Class 29 covers dairy, meat, preserved and processed food products, so a fried-chicken brand selling frozen packs needs it, while a pizza brand's packaged pizza sits in Class 30. Class 32 covers bottled juices, soft drinks and packaged water under your own label, and beer as a product. Class 33 covers wine and spirits as products — serving someone else's whisky at your bar does not need Class 33, but launching your own branded bottle does, and a trademark never replaces an excise licence. Class 35 covers retail services, online ordering and franchise business support, which matters the moment you run your own store or start supporting franchisees. Class 39 covers a delivery service run as its own brand, and Classes 9 and 42 cover a downloadable ordering app and an online ordering platform respectively. Merely listing on Zomato or Swiggy needs none of those app classes.

The trap runs both ways. File only Class 43 and your bottled sauce is unprotected. File eight classes on day one and you have spent thousands on lines you may never launch. File for what you sell now, plus what has a dated plan behind it, and keep the rest for later filings.

Word mark or logo mark — which one first for a restaurant?

A word mark protects the name itself, in any font, colour or styling. A logo or device mark protects one specific visual version of it. File the logo alone and a rival can use your name in plain text on their signboard and argue they never copied your design. File the word mark and you hold the name however it is written.

For a restaurant, the order I suggest is the same as for any brand: word mark first. Your name travels further than your logo — onto aggregator listings, bills, packaging, franchise documents and GST invoices. File the logo next if customers recognise it on its own, a mascot, a monogram, or a distinctive signboard design. If your logo is just your name typed in a nice font, the word mark already does most of the work. Two filings mean two sets of fees, because every fee is charged per class, per mark.

What does registration cost?

The government fee for filing Form TM-A online is ₹4,500 per class for an individual, a DPIIT-recognised startup or a small enterprise with a Udyam certificate, and ₹9,000 per class for every other applicant, such as a private limited company that is not MSME-registered. Physical filing costs ₹500 more per class in each category. The fee pays for examination, not for a result — an application that gets objected to or abandoned does not earn a refund.

Work it out for your own outlet. A sole-proprietor café owner filing a word mark in Class 43 alone pays ₹4,500 in government fees. Add Class 30 for packaged coffee beans and the total becomes ₹9,000. A private limited restaurant company filing a word mark in Class 43 and Class 35 for its own online store pays ₹18,000. A professional fee sits on top of that and varies by firm, so budget the two parts separately and ask what the professional fee covers: search, filing, objection replies and hearing attendance are not always in the same quote.

Renewal is a separate, later cost. A registered mark lasts 10 years from the filing date and can be renewed indefinitely in 10-year blocks by filing Form TM-R, at ₹9,000 per class online. Miss the renewal window and you face the restoration route, which costs far more than renewing on time.

How the process runs, step by step

First, search. Run your name through the IP India public search before you spend anything, and check similar names in Class 43, not just identical ones. A name that sounds alike or looks alike can block you just as firmly as an exact match. Our guide to the IP India trademark public search walks through the search itself.

Next, file Form TM-A on the IP India portal with the mark, the class or classes, and the applicant's correct legal name. That last detail matters more than owners expect. File in a personal name when the business is a company, or under an old partnership name, and you will pay later to fix the record — usually at the worst possible moment, during a funding round or a franchise negotiation.

Then comes examination. An examiner checks the application against the Trade Marks Act, 1999 and earlier marks, and may raise objections, often for lack of distinctiveness or similarity to an existing mark. You answer with evidence and argument. Clear the examination and the mark is published in the Trade Marks Journal, where anyone has four months to oppose it. No opposition, or an opposition you win, and the certificate follows. Published guides quote anywhere from 6 to 18 months for a clean case, so plan on a year or more and treat anything faster as a bonus. File early, because the filing date is what anchors your claim.

The second-outlet trap

This is where restaurant owners get hurt most. The first outlet runs on reputation in one neighbourhood. The second outlet, in another city, runs on a name that strangers have to trust. If someone in that city already trades under a similar name for food services, your expansion walks straight into their territory — and if they filed first, you may be the one asked to change your signboard.

Search before you sign the second lease, not after. The search costs nothing compared with rebranding two outlets, reprinting packaging, changing aggregator listings and explaining the new name to regulars. A filed application also changes how a dispute plays out: a warning letter backed by a pending application carries weight that an unfiled name does not.

Franchising: a trademark is the starting point, not the whole deal

A registered mark is what makes franchising possible — it is the asset you licence to a franchisee. But the mark alone does not run a franchise. You still need a franchise agreement that controls how the name is used, what quality standards apply, what territory the franchisee gets, what fees are payable, and what happens on termination. A franchisee who uses your name badly damages the very goodwill the trademark protects, so quality control is part of protecting the mark, not paperwork on the side.

Two warnings here. First, do not promise a franchise before the mark is filed; a franchisee is buying the right to use a name you have not yet secured. Second, never hand over the mark itself when you mean to licence it. A licence lets someone use the name under your control. A transfer gives it away, and putting that right again is a separate, expensive process.

Five mistakes restaurant owners keep making

One, filing only the logo and assuming the name is covered. It is not. Two, filing in the wrong applicant name and discovering the mismatch during a franchise deal. Three, skipping the search and falling in love with a name that already belongs to another restaurant in Class 43. Four, assuming Class 43 covers packaged products, merch or a delivery app, and discovering the gap when a rival launches them under a similar name. Five, treating registration as a one-time job and forgetting the 10-year renewal — a lapsed mark is an open invitation, and our guide to trademark renewal in Form TM-R explains the grace period and restoration route.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use ™ before my restaurant trademark is registered? Yes. The ™ symbol simply claims the name as your mark, and you can use it from the day you start using the name. The ® symbol is different: use it only after registration, since using it for an unregistered mark is an offence under the Trade Marks Act.

Does one filing protect my restaurant name across India? Yes, a trademark registered in India covers the whole country. It does not extend abroad. For outlets outside India, you need separate filings or an international application through the Madrid Protocol, using the Indian filing as the base.

Do I need a trademark if I only sell through Zomato and Swiggy? A listing is not protection. Aggregators can delist a copycat only within their own policies, and a filed mark gives a takedown notice weight that an unfiled name does not carry. If your brand lives on aggregators, that is a reason to file, not a reason to skip it.

What if someone objects to my application? An objection from the examiner and an opposition from a third party are two different fights, with different replies and timelines. Our objection vs opposition guide sets out which is which and what each one needs from you.

Should I file before I open, or after the restaurant is running? Before, if you can. You can file on a "proposed to be used" basis, which is the sensible route for an outlet still under fit-out. Just remember that a mark filed and then never used can be challenged for removal later, so open within a reasonable time.

A restaurant brand is built twice: once in the customer's memory and once on the register. The first takes years of good food and steady service. The second takes one careful filing, done early, in the right class, in the right name. If you are planning a second outlet or a first franchise, search the name first, file the word mark in Class 43, and add the product and retail classes as your menu and your ambitions grow. For help with the filing itself, see our trademark registration service, and for the tax side of running the outlet, read our guide to GST for restaurants: 5% vs 18%.