Delhi High Court refuses to injunct Puro Healthy Salt ad in Tata suit claiming disparagement of its product

The Delhi High Court has refused to pass any interim injunction against a commercial being aired by Puro Wellness for its pink-coloured rock salt, marketed as Puro Healthy Salt. [Tata Sons Private Limited & Anr v. Puro Wellness Private Limited & Anr].Justice C Hari Shankar said that Tata Sons Private Limited, which had alleged that the Puro salt advertisement disparaged white salt, failed to make out a prima facie case to interfere with the commercial's broadcast..The Court said that the commercial does not directly make any comment regarding white salt. It noted that at most, there is a showing of preference for Puro’s salt even when the white salt is available because it “was healthy.”“It is highly debatable as to whether this can result in an inference that white salt is unhealthy,” the judgment stated..The Court said that prima facie, it would be difficult to hold that the positive assertions made about Puro’s Healthy Salt “would inevitably result in a consumer reading, into those assertions, negative aspersions regarding Tata White Salt.".In the commercial under scrutiny, Puro had declared its product natural, free from chemicals and additives, not processed or bleached, and a healthy alternative to common salt. While so, the Court noted that Tata had made the same assertions with respect to its own brand of pink salt..The Court further rejected Tata’s contention that Puro cannot depict or advertise its salt as “healthy” as it would violate the Food Safety Regulations. It added that declaring one’s product to be superior to others was permissible in comparative advertising. “It is only where the purported inferiority of others’ products, to one’s own, is attributed to some specific feature, which is described in qualitative or quantitative terms, that the truth of the assertion is required to be established,” the Court explained..The judgment went on to state that a competitor must not be permitted to resort to litigation in order to dictate the manner in which a rival’s products are to be advertised.“His right begins and ends with ensuring that his product is not disparaged. Additionally, the highest that he can seek is that the rival does not, in puffing up his product, resort to serious representations of fact which are misleading or incorrect, or in support of which no quantitative or qualitative data is forthcoming.".In conclusion, the Court opined that Puro's advertisement was well within the boundaries of permissible comparative advertising.“If a commercial as innocuous as this is to be injuncted, one may as well completely do away with the concept of comparative advertising altogether,” the Court said while denying Tata any interlocutory injunctive relief..Senior Advocates Dr. Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Rajiv Nayar with Advocates Pravin Anand, Achuthan Sreekumar, Zafeer Ahmed, Rohit Bansal and Apoorva Prasad R represented Tata Sons.Senior Advocate Akhil Sibal with Advocates Nishad Nadkarni, Ankur Sangal, Raghu Vinayak Sinha, Khushboo Jhunjhunwala, Shaurya Pandey, Asavari Jain and Jaanvi Chopra of Khaitan & Co. represented Puro Wellness.. [Read Judgment]