SAN FRANCISCO (LN) — A federal judge in San Jose ruled Thursday that Impossible Foods Inc. willfully infringed the trademarks of a smaller rival, denying the company's bid to escape a $3.25 million jury verdict on laches grounds and ordering an award of attorneys' fees after finding the case exceptional under the Lanham Act.
The ruling follows a March 2026 trial in which a jury sided entirely with Impossible X LLC — the company founded by Joel Runyon, who built his "Impossible" brand around a fitness blog starting in 2010 — and against Impossible Foods, the maker of the Impossible Burger, on every claim. The jury awarded $1.5 million in corrective advertising damages and $1.75 million in punitive damages after finding Impossible Foods acted with oppression, fraud, or malice.
U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman rejected Impossible Foods's argument that Impossible X LLC had slept on its rights by waiting until 2024 to assert counterclaims, even though Runyon testified he had noticed Impossible Foods using the word "IMPOSSIBLE" in a similar styling to Impossible X LLC's logo and thought it looked like their logo as early as 2015 or 2016. The willfulness finding, Freeman wrote, was fatal to the laches defense: a willful infringer cannot invoke an equitable doctrine that protects only those parties who come to the court with clean hands.
Impossible Foods had urged the court to carve out a reverse-confusion exception, arguing that the willfulness bar on laches applies only where a junior user intentionally capitalizes on an established senior mark. Freeman was unpersuaded, describing Impossible Foods's argument that willfulness can, at times, be a bar to laches as quite the understatement, and noting that Impossible Foods failed to identify a single instance in which laches operated to bar recovery against a willful infringer.
On fees, Freeman declined to treat the jury's willfulness finding as automatically dispositive but found the case exceptional under the totality of the circumstances. The court pointed to evidence that a senior Impossible Foods employee had visited Impossible X LLC's website for promotional ideas, and that Impossible Foods had learned of Runyon's trademark registrations during its own initial trademark search. More damaging, Freeman found that Impossible Foods's affirmative infringement claims against Impossible X LLC's nutritional supplements were presented at trial through little more than a paralegal reciting trademark registrations, with no evidence of product similarity, overlapping marketing channels, or actual consumer confusion — a presentation the court called clearly deficient.
Freeman denied Impossible X LLC's request for enhanced damages. The court found the jury's $3.25 million award fully compensated Impossible X LLC for the infringement, noting that Impossible X LLC's apparel business had generated less than $0.10 million in lifetime sales and that the Foods Cookbook had lost money, making any further award punitive rather than compensatory under the Lanham Act. The court also declined to order the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to reject Impossible Foods's pending application for the IMPOSSIBLE mark in connection with recipes and cooking information, finding Impossible X LLC's two-paragraph briefing on the issue too sparse to justify interfering with the PTO's process.
The court did grant a permanent injunction barring Impossible Foods from using IMPOSSIBLE as a standalone word on apparel or cookbooks, adopting Impossible Foods's own proposed language requiring that any use of the word be accompanied by other visible words or symbols — a formulation Freeman found provided a clearer line between permissible and impermissible conduct than Impossible X LLC's broader proposal.
The fee amount remains to be determined. Runyon stated in a declaration that he spent more than $6 million litigating the case, partially funding it by liquidating his retirement accounts.