For American justice, Gruyere doesn’t have to be Swiss or French

After feta or brie, will there be Gruyère cheese “made in the USA”? The French and Swiss producers of the famous cheese from the Alps try to protect the denomination of origin, but have just suffered a serious setback before the American justice system.

A federal judge last week ruled that the term Gruyere had become “generic” in U.S, which prevents it from being registered in the trademark registry in order to restrict it to products originating in Switzerland or France.

In a decision of some thirty pages, Judge TS Ellis highlights that there are American producers who have been making Gruyere in the State of Wisconsin since 1980, and that more than half of the Gruyere imported into the United States between 2010 and 2020 was produced in Germany and Holland.

“Decades of importation, production and sales of cheeses called Gruyere, but produced outside the Gruyere region of France and Switzerland, have eroded the meaning of the term and made it generic,” he wrote.

Not even the dictionaries mention the geographical origin of this “cow’s milk cheese, of cooked pasta with holes”, despite the fact that its appearance is recorded since the 17th century in the Alps, relieves the magistrate.

The Gruyere Interprofessional organization, which represents the sector’s actors in Switzerland, and the Gruyere Interprofessional Union, its French counterpart, announced on Monday their intention to appeal the decision.

For them, the gruyere, which benefits from a protected designation of origin in both countries, “is manufactured with care from local and natural ingredients, using traditional methods that ensure a link between the region and the quality of the final product.”

“Wisconsin-made cheese cannot reproduce the unique flavor of true Swiss- or French-made Gruyere,” they wrote in their original complaint.

On the US side, industry players hailed “a historic victory.”

In a statement, they indicated that this decision “sets a precedent in a much broader battle over the names of food products in the United States.”

The European Union (EU) tried to obtain protections for some 200 products associated with its territories (comté, chablis, parmesan, bolognese, etc.), during the negotiations for a free trade agreement between Europe and the United States (Tafta), but failure.

In the absence of agreement, a case-by-case basis prevails: If the Greek feta or chablis have already lost the fight, the United States reserves the use of the terms “roquefort” or “cognac” for products made in the vicinity of eponymous French cities.