St. Louis bakery embroiled in smiley cookies trademark dispute with Eat'n Park

Eat’n Park isn’t smiling over a St. Louis bakery producing a similarly named cookie.

McArthur’s Bakery and The Pioneer Cafe in St. Louis, which employs adults with disabilities, has received a cease and desist letter from Pittsburgh-­based restaurant chain Eat’n Park alleging trademark infringement over its popular Smiley Cookies.

McArthur’s owner Scott Rinaberger said Eat’n Park’s request is unjust. He founded Smiley Face Cookie Co.

“I don’t think anybody would confuse our cookies for theirs,” he said, calling the designs “perfectly imperfect” smiley faces.

The Pioneer Cafe is a training facility for adults with disabilities, giving them practical experience before finding competitive employment. Through the program, the bakery created a separate brand called Smiley Face Cookie Co. to sell cookies decorated by people in the program.

“We can coexist. They have their brand; they have their cookie,” Rinaberger said. “I don’t think our perfectly imperfect cookies look anything like their cookies.”

And he claims that McArthur’s Bakery has been selling the cookies for many decades — even before he purchased the bakery in 2014. The original owners had operated the bakery since the ’70s, he said.

“Through the years, we’ve always been making them,” Rinaberger said. “As part of the Pioneer Cafe, we took that and made it a primary part of it.”

On Facebook, he said he started polling former customers to see what they knew about the smiley cookies’ history at McArthur’s.

“Some remembered buying them in the ’70s, some in ’80s and many in ’90s,” Rinaberger said.

The cookies are sold in 77 Schnucks supermarkets, a local grocery store chain in the St. Louis area. Those supermarkets are the only place the cookies are sold aside from the bakery, he said.

Legal action

Rinaberger said he received the latest cease and desist letter from Eat’n Park within the past month — but it wasn’t the first one.

He said he believes the first letter was sent from Eat’n Park around 2010 before he purchased the bakery in 2014. He then personally received one in 2016 and another in 2022 before an email recently.

“We’ve kind of ignored it because we feel that we’ve been making them as long as they have,” Rinaberger said.

The letters from Eat’n Park have become more aggressive, he said, as the most recent email was directed to his attorneys.

“I think it’s their history of aggressively pursuing the defense of their trademark has us to the point where we know it’s coming,” Rinaberger said. “At this point, it’s a decision where do we stay firm, or rebrand ourselves and move on.”

Eat’n Park did not return multiple requests by TribLive for comment.

However, it issued a statement on the matter to the Pittsburgh Business Times.

“We’ve owned the Smiley Cookie trademark since we first introduced Smiley Cookies to our restaurants in the 1980s,” said Eat’n Park’s Dec. 5 statement. “The defense of this trademark is a necessary step in protecting our brand so we can continue to serve our guests and the community, just as we have for the last 75 years.”

Rinaberger explained the cease and desist is all about the name and the brand — and that the cookie designs would be able to remain the same. However, defending the brand would be expensive, especially for a small business.

“It would pretty much drain us,” Rinaberger said.

And yet, he’s not deterred.

“We’re kind of reevaluating defending ourselves over the reactions and support, especially from Pittsburgh over the weekend,” Rinaberger said, citing multiple calls and social media comments in support. “We’re not 100% going toward a rebrand after the weekend.”

Rinaberger said Thursday he set up a GoFundMe for a defense fund, with a goal of raising $25,000. No money hadbeen donated as of Thursday afternoon.

He said he believes that since Smiley Face Cookie Co. was a byproduct of the Pioneer Cafe, and the bakery has been making smiley cookies for decades, the bakery has a legal right to keep its branding.

“Plus, there are many, many bakeries making these cookies, calling them smiley cookies, throughout the United States,” Rinaberger alleged.

If McArthur’s ends up rebranding, he said he’s taking ideas from the public, and he’s already had more than 100 suggestions.

“(We) can’t have the word smile or smiley in it, even various spellings,” Rinaberger said.

For now, he said, the bakery isn’t making any quick decisions on the situation.

“We don’t feel like we need to be in a rush,” Rinaberger said.