We use the term bundt pan and bundt cake generically for a type of cake pan and a type of cake baked in this pan. However, the term BUNDT for a fluted and scalloped ring-shaped tube pan is trademarked by Northland Aluminum, makers of NordicWare. The trademark case of the term “Bundt” for a type of cake mix provides an interesting example of when a victim of genericide in which the victim tried to prove a distinctive secondary meaning but failed to do so.
The Bundt cake derived in part from a European brioche-like cake called Gugelhupf, which was particularly popular among Jewish communities in parts of Germany, Austria, and Poland. In the north of Germany, Gugelhupf is traditionally known as Bundkuchen (German pronunciation: [ˈbʊntkuːxn]), a name formed by joining the two words Kuchen (cake) and Bund. In the trademark case of Nordicware’s “Bundt cake pans,” the company hit a brick wall. The name Bundt Cake had been used for many years for such cakes before they ever applied for the mark!
The company’s fluted cake pans barely sold at first, probably because the American public was not generally aware of such cakes. It wasn’t until 1963 that sales of the pans took off.
The Bundt pan survived the “generic trap,” but many other famous foods didn’t. Discover how names like Escalator, Thermos, and Shredded Wheat became dictionary definitions in our full report:
What Happens When Trademarked Food Names Become Generic?
The Cake That Saved the Pan
For the first fifteen years of its existence, the Bundt pan was a slow seller. That changed overnight in 1966 (often cited as ’63, but the breakthrough was the 17th Annual Bake-Off) when Ella Helfrich won second place in the Pillsbury Bake-Off with her “Tunnel of Fudge” cake.
The recipe was a sensation, but it required a very specific tool: a fluted tube pan. Suddenly, women across America were scouring stores for “that ring pan.” Nordic Ware went from producing a few hundred pans a year to 30,000 a day. This massive surge in popularity is exactly what led to the “Generic” trap—because the pan became a household staple, the public began using “Bundt” to describe the shape rather than the brand.
🍺Related Case: The “Lite” Spelling Brew-haha: Adding a “t” to the word Bund was a strategic move to create a brandable name. However, as the makers of Miller Lite discovered, simply misspelling a generic word doesn’t always guarantee protection.
Learn why the courts ruled that no one can own the “Lite” beer trademark.
The Fight for the “Bundt” Trademark
In 1972, Northland Aluminum licensed the use of the word Bundt for a ring cake mix to Pillsbury and filed for a trademark on the use of the word Bundt for such a cake mix.
The trademark examiner asked the company whether Bundt was a foreign word, and Northland responded that they were unaware of any particular meaning of the word and that the only use of the term, for over twenty years, was to identify its pans, exclusively.
The examiner found cookbook recipes and newspaper articles referring to bundt cake or bundt style cake and found that the name “hardly functions as a mark which is capable of distinguishing applicant’s goods.”
📍 Legal Spotlight: The “Regional” Trademark: While Nordic Ware successfully claimed the “Bundt” name nationwide, not every trademark battle ends in a total victory. In the case of Zatarain’s, the courts ruled that their “Fish-Fri” name was only protected in New Orleans, where it had a deep “secondary meaning,” while remaining generic everywhere else.
Read about the Zatarain’s Fish-Fri vs. Chick-Fri Battle.
Generic Trademarks and the Lanham Act
Some argue that a generic term is a generic term whether it has always been generic or whether it has acquired a generic meaning. Therefore, a generic term can never be trademarked regardless of the secondary meanings that it may have acquired. However, section two of the Lanham Act sets down conditions applicable to these questions, as to whether a trademark is registrable:
No trademark by which the goods of the applicant may be distinguished from the goods of others shall be refused registration on the principal register on account of its nature unless it —
(e) Consists of a mark which, (1) when applied to the goods of the applicant is merely descriptive … of them….
(f) Except as expressly excluded in paragraphs (a)-(d) of this section, nothing in this chapter shall prevent the registration of a mark used by the applicant which has become distinctive of the applicant’s goods in commerce.
In other words, a mark can become distinctive, regardless of how generic it is, and therefore said mark can be registered as a trademark. While it is not entirely clear what the word bund was supposed to mean, but it is claimed that when H. David Dalsquist and his brother, owners of Nordic Ware, started making fluted and scalloped ring pans for making these types of cakes, a “t” was added to the word bund to form Bundt.
The “Danish Bundle” Argument
There is, however, a Danish word bundt that mean bundle. Dalquist could argue that their use of the term was “arbitrary” or “fanciful” because the literal meaning has nothing to do with the product. If “Bundt” means “bundle” in Danish, it has no inherent connection to a “fluted cake,” which usually makes a trademark stronger in the eyes of the law (like “Apple” for computers).
Dalquist was modifying existing Scandinavian designs to make his aluminum version of the forms, it seems questionable whether he needed to make up a new word “fanciful” word for them! Therefore, the Danish word bundt was of little help, since the German origin of the cake was too well-documented in America.
Proof of Secondary Meaning
Subsequent to the examiner’s finding, Northland amended its application, saying that, without giving up any rights it may have built up, it had no intention of trying to claim exclusive rights to the word “bundt” as a type of cake made from scratch. In other words, the company disclaimed any rights to the term used to describe a finished cake, if such usage existed.
But, said Northland, the term Bundt was unknown to most Americans, except as used to describe its pans or in connection with cake mix packages. They were trying to prove that bundt was not a descriptive name for a type of cake.
The 2.8 Percent Argument
The company even asserted that the term was only really known by homemakers with training in German Jewish cooking, which constituted no more than 2.8 percent of the U.S. population.
The trademark application examiner responded that while it was possible that a secondary meaning may have been acquired, it didn’t matter, as the term was generic enough that it could not ever be trademarked. This decision by the examiner was clearly at odds with the actual law. It WAS possible for a secondary meaning to be sufficient to rescue a generic term.
The Appellate Court’s Rebuttal
However, the U.S Court of Appeals held that while a secondary meaning could theoretically save a generic term, Northland (Nordic Ware) simply failed to prove they actually had one. The question then is, did the public generally identify the word Bundt with Pillsbury’s cake mix more than it identified the word as a general descriptive term for a type of cake?
- The Burden of Proof: To win, Northland had to prove that when people heard “Bundt,” they thought of Pillsbury/Nordic Ware (the brand) more than they thought of a type of cake (the category).
- The Flawed Evidence: They submitted affidavits by three food professionals stating that they recognized the term Bundt as being a trademark for these types of ring-shaped pans. They also submitted a survey showing that 75-84% of people knew the “Bundt” cake mix. But the court “flipped the script,” noting that the same survey showed that 25% of people only saw it as a type of cake.
- The Final Blow: The court ruled that if a significant portion of the public uses the word to describe the product rather than the brand, it remains generic.
This is a very good example of the type of proof insufficient to prove distinctiveness or secondary meaning, something that is very difficult to prove in all cases. Northland was unable to make its case for Bundt having acquired a distinctive secondary meaning as a particular cake mix made by Pillsbury.
The Court of Appeals ultimately ruled that Northland’s evidence was a double-edged sword. While the survey showed high brand awareness, it also proved that the term was deeply embedded in the public consciousness as a descriptive name for a type of cake. In trademark law, if a term is ‘primarily’ understood by the public as the name of the product itself, no amount of advertising or ‘secondary meaning’ can rescue it. The court concluded that ‘Bundt’ was, and had always been, a generic term for a fluted cake, and therefore, Northland could not claim exclusive rights to the word for its cake mixes.
The Split Verdict: Pans vs. Mixes
While Northland Aluminum lost its fight to trademark ‘Bundt’ for cake mixes, they managed to protect the name where it mattered most: the hardware. The courts recognized that while a consumer might use ‘bundt’ to describe any ring-shaped cake, they still associated the specific name ‘Bundt’ with Nordic Ware when shopping for high-quality cookware.
This created a unique legal situation where you can legally sell a ‘bundt cake’ or a ‘bundt cake mix’ (as Pillsbury does today under license), but you cannot sell a ‘Bundt pan’ unless it comes from Nordic Ware. For everyone else, it has to be labeled a ‘fluted tube pan.'”
An interesting side-note that comes out of this case is that the word “Bundt” does not seem to be original to Nordic Ware, as most sources assume. That is, the story that a “t” was added to the word bund to invent the word bundt, which is indeed an actual Danish word, may not be true. It seems that the word bundt may have been used in America at least 20 years before the Dalquists started making their pans.
Evidence from the Settlement Cook Book
The trademark examiner, having searched for instances of the word bundt used to describe cakes, found plenty of evidence of its use. In particular, the examiner cited the 1930 edition of The Settlement Cook Book which he said contained two recipes for Bundt Kuchen. Recall the German word Bundkuchen from the explanation given above.
The Settlement Cookbook was originally entitled “The Way to a Man’s Heart” and was published by the Milwaukee Settlement House in 1903, with German Jewish recipes compiled by Simon Kander and Henry Schoenfeld.
The recipes for bundt cake using the term Bundt Kuchen appear to have been used in the original edition, although I cannot be sure. They were used as early as 1915, though. In the book, there are three recipes, Bundt Kuchen No. 1 and 2, and “Baking Powder Bundt Kuchen.” The first two are doughs made from butter and yeast, which is more traditional for these types of cakes.
Bundt Kuchen No. 2 refers to a Bundt form and describes it as a “heavy round fluted pan with tube in center.” The Baking Powder Bundt Kuchen recipe again calls for a bundt form, this time describing it as “a deep round fancy cake pan with tube in center.” These are not the only recipes in the book where a bundt form is called for, however.
Did the Word Bundt Already Exist?
The evidence from early 20th-century cookbooks makes it clear that the term ‘Bundt’ was not a 1950s invention. While the Dalquist story of adding a ‘t’ to the word Bund is a charming piece of brand lore, the word already existed in the American culinary lexicon as a generic descriptor for both the cake and the form. This historical presence is precisely why the trademark examiner argued that the name could not function as a unique brand identifier.
Other fanciful stories are added to strengthen Dalquist’s claim of invention. For example, it is claimed that Dalquist added the T to differentiate the name from a pro-Hitler German-American from the 1930s called “the Bund.”
It is possible that he invented the word independently of its being used in the past to denote a cake and a cake form, but it is also possible that this story was made up to lend further credence to the distinctiveness of the name as a trademark, since the trademark would be easier to defend on the grounds it was “misspelled” or “misused” foreign word that had no real meaning.
The story of the Bundt pan is a rare success story in the world of food law. While many other iconic products have seen their names slip into the public domain, Nordic Ware managed to hold the line by proving that their specific hardware, the fluted tube pan, still carried a unique brand identity.
Today, the situation remains a fascinating legal compromise: you can bake a ‘bundt cake’ using any recipe you like, but if you want to sell a ‘Bundt pan,’ it must come from the original Minneapolis manufacturer. This delicate balance between a brand and a generic category is a central theme in the history of culinary branding. For a deeper look at how this process has shaped everything from kitchen staples to snack foods, see our comprehensive guide on what happens when trademarked food names become generic.
Further Reading on Food Trademarks
- Lite vs. Light: The Beer Trademark Battle: Discover why Miller couldn’t protect a phonetic misspelling of a common word.
- Someone Trademarked Smiley Face Cookies: The surprising legal fight over one of the world’s most recognizable symbols.
- The Oldest Food Trademark in the United States: A look back at the very first food brand to seek legal protection.
- Did You Know Cheeseburger Was a Trademark?: Long before it was a menu staple, one restaurant claimed exclusive rights to the name.