When Ander Mendes, Tamar Gigolashvili and Julien Justa got the idea to sell alcohol-saturated gamma bears, they did not expect such attention from the media and did not realize that they had problems with the law.

Last year, these three young people from the Basque Country decided to combine sweets with alcohol because they “combined well”. But a few weeks ago they received a letter to cease production from the German multinational corporation Haribo, which said that Basque bears are too similar to their golden bears.

“We contacted a lawyer who said that he had never seen anything like it before.”. He gave us two solutions: either drop the entire business, or deal with the consequences, ”Mendes says..

Young entrepreneurs from Portugalete, a city west of Bilbao in the province of Bizkaia, chose the second path: to confront the German giant. “There are many similar brands that work with little bears, and they are not Haribo,” adds Mendes, quoted by Spain in Russian..

Haribo says it only “protects” its intellectual property rights and image. In a statement, the company said it had initiated a “standard legal procedure” to protect its trademark.. It also adds that Haribo is not going to capture the market for alcoholic sweets. On its web page, the company reports that it registered its golden bears as a trademark in 1967..

The legal dispute hit the pages of Spanish, British and German newspapers. While German agencies Bild and Die Zeit claimed Haribo had officially sued the Spanish company, the confectionery giant denied this..

In a telephone conversation, Mendes said that media attention was very helpful for his company.. “Visits to our site have increased dramatically. Some visited out of curiosity, while others bought. We get peaks in the days when German media talk about us. ”. Sales mainly come from Barcelona, \u200b\u200bMadrid and the Basque Country..

Mendes warns that seven or eight of these Basque bears are the equivalent of a glass of wine or beer, as their alcohol content is 15%.

“You have to be as careful as if you had a regular alcoholic drink,” he notes.

The product was first sold in cocktail bars in the Basque region, then at Valencia Airport. Due to growing demand, production was transferred from Burgos, in the region of Castile and Leon, to a plant in the province of Alava.

“It’s typical for young people to mix sweets and alcohol. Thanks to this project, we recalled those good times that we had at parties, ”says Mendes.