Burger battle: How a tiny Westport food truck found itself at odds with McDonald's

A Westport food truck has been sent a cease-and-desist letter by McDonald's over its burger of the week.Mister Chops operates three days a week and regularly changes its menu. Recently, its featured burger was the "Chops Big Mac".That prompted the letter from McDonald's, alleging misuse of a trademark and claiming the burger closely resembles its well-known staples.It gave Mister Chops until Friday to erase all traces of the burger.Owners of Mister Chops Rob Carroll and Alex Hogg told Checkpoint they were shocked to receive the letter."Being a small little food truck in Westport, we didn't think it would pop up on their radar at all."The pair told lawyers for McDonald's that the burger was a one-off special.SuppliedCarroll said it was hard to gauge why the fast food giant would want to engage with them at all, particularly given the nearest McDonald's was over 100km away."Us selling a burger for three days of the week, just one time, is not going to have any impact on their brand or their sales at all. So it's hard to make any kind of sense of why they would even bother to reach out to us."He said they were happy to admit that their burger did have some similarities to the classic Big Mac."We did a double-decker burger, like the Big Mac and yes, it did contain two beef patties and lettuce and a special sauce and a middle bun."However, Hogg said those things weren't hard to come by in a classic burger.The pair feature a different burger special on their menu each week, and by the time the cease-and-desist letter arrived the "Chops Big Mac" was already gone."Once we explained that it was our burger of the week and that it wasn't going to appear again, [the lawyer for McDonald's was] like, yep, sweet, case closed.Chops Big Mac, the burger that caught the attention of the lawyers for McDonald's.Supplied"We're not challenging their brand or anything like that... some of the regulars had said, hey, why don't you try a Big Mac, because people like McDonald's. So we did a Big Mac and we had no idea that this was going to happen, we didn't think we were ever going to make their radar."Carroll and Hogg said they could understand the fact that McDonald's had to protect their brand."If you let one person away with it, then what's to say some other franchise burger place in the city doesn't do the same and actually cut into their sales."The pair weren't sure who had dobbed them in, but said they liked to imagine it was someone on their side hoping to give them a publicity boost.Carroll said their customers had gotten a good laugh out of the whole situation."Some of them said that our Big Mac was better than the original."Mister Chops now has a new weekly special, the O.D.B. - a chilli con carne burger named after a member of the Wu-Tang Clan.