Britannia's 50-50 biscuit has carried the same green wrapper for years — it's arguably as recognisable as the biscuit itself in Indian kitchens. In January 2026, Britannia launched a cheese-flavoured version, and the packaging wasn't green. It was black, with yellow and orange accents and an angled shot of a cracker glistening with melted cheese.
ITC noticed the resemblance to its own Sunfeast Wowzers — Cheese Variant, which it had been selling in near-identical black-and-cheese packaging since November 2024. In February 2026, ITC filed suit against Britannia in the Calcutta High Court, alleging the new 50-50 wrapper copies Wowzers' distinctive look closely enough to confuse a shopper scanning a crowded biscuit shelf.
Why a wrapper is worth suing over
The dispute sounds cosmetic until you see what ITC says is riding on it. According to the filing, Wowzers built itself into the number-two seller in its category within twelve months of launch, on sales of roughly ₹51.45 crore — a genuinely fast climb for a snack going up against biscuit brands that have owned Indian shelves for generations. ITC is seeking ₹50 crore in damages, arguing that Britannia's black-based redesign for its own cheese variant was less a coincidence than a shortcut: ride the visual cues a newer, faster-growing product had already trained shoppers to associate with "cheese biscuit," without doing the work of establishing a new look from scratch.
That's the commercial logic behind most packaging-imitation suits in FMCG, and it's a real risk in a category this crowded. A shopper standing at a biscuit shelf for four seconds isn't reading ingredient lists — they're pattern-matching on colour and shape. If a new entrant's packaging has done the work of teaching that shopper "black wrapper, glistening cheese shot means this flavour," a near-identical wrapper on a rival's product can borrow that association for free.
Where the case actually stands
Britannia hasn't conceded anything. Its response so far has focused on disputing ITC's account of how widely Wowzers had actually launched, and the company has asked the court for time to file a full affidavit-in-opposition. No interim injunction was sought or granted, which means both biscuits are sitting on shelves in their current packaging while the case proceeds — the Calcutta High Court has not weighed in on originality, similarity, or the likelihood of consumer confusion at this stage; those questions are still to be argued.
That procedural detail matters more than it looks like it does. An IP fight without an injunction is a slow-moving one — this could run for a year or more through affidavits and hearings before a court forms a view on the merits, all while both products keep selling under the packaging in dispute.
What it says about the biscuit aisle in 2026
Packaged snacking in India has gotten more crowded, not less, and cheese-flavoured biscuits are a genuinely small niche within it — which is exactly why a fight this specific broke out. When a category is broad enough (plain glucose biscuits, say), there's room for five brands to coexist without anyone confusing one wrapper for another. When it's this narrow, two entrants chasing the same flavour occasion end up converging on similar visual shorthand almost by necessity — black backgrounds and cheese-pull photography are the obvious way to signal "this one's cheese" — and that convergence is precisely what makes a look-alike claim hard to adjudicate cleanly. Distinctiveness and category convention start to blur into each other, and untangling which is which is now the Calcutta High Court's problem, not just ITC's and Britannia's.
The part that's easy to miss: 50-50 is the older brand here
It's worth sitting with the irony of the roles. Britannia's 50-50 has been on Indian shelves since 1993 — one of the country's longest-running savoury biscuit lines, built almost entirely on its original green wrapper and a sweet-and-salty flavour combination that needed no explanation. Sunfeast Wowzers, by contrast, launched in November 2024. It is the newcomer in the category by a margin of decades.
That makes this an unusual look-alike dispute. Most packaging-imitation suits run in the direction you'd expect: an established brand accuses a new entrant of trading on decades of built-up shelf recognition. Here, it's the newer product — Wowzers, on the market barely fifteen months when it filed — accusing the legacy brand of copying it. ITC's argument only works if a court accepts that fifteen months was enough time for a specific colour-and-imagery combination to become distinctively associated with Wowzers in a shopper's mind, rather than simply being the industry-standard way of signalling "cheese flavour" that any brand could reach for. That's a genuinely higher bar than the usual imitation claim, and it's the question the case will likely turn on once arguments on the merits actually begin.
The bigger pattern this sits inside
This isn't ITC and Britannia's first proximity fight, either — the two have circled each other across categories for years, from atta to salt to biscuits broadly, as India's packaged food giants increasingly compete on adjacent shelf space rather than genuinely differentiated products. A court ruling here, whichever way it goes, will likely become a reference point the next time two FMCG majors end up with suspiciously similar wrappers on a crowded shelf — which, in a market this competitive, is less a question of if than when.
For now, the more immediate effect isn't legal, it's commercial: two large companies are spending money on litigation instead of on the next flavour extension, while shoppers who couldn't care less about wrapper provenance keep buying whichever bag is closer to the till.
