Whole Foods Market can’t claim the title of “World’s Healthiest Grocery Store,” the U.S. government says. The supermarket chain had applied to trademark the phrase in June, after having secured exclusive rights to the moniker “America’s Healthiest Grocery Store” in 2010. But the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused to grant Whole Foods WFM -0.42% the rights to the global superlative, calling it “merely descriptive.” It even schooled the grocery store in English grammar, going so far as to include in its rejection a screenshot of Dictionary.com, showing that “healthiest” is considered an adjective. The patent regulator frowns on “self-laudatory” and “puffing” trademark applications, because such claims just describe “the character or quality of the goods [or services],” it wrote in its rejection letter. “In fact, ‘puffing, if anything, is more likely to render a mark merely descriptive, not less so,'” it said, citing a previous patent law case.
