News24 | Battle over kids’ nuggets: Eskort must change its labels after Rainbow Chicken win

Both Rainbow Chicken’s Chickees (launched in 2023) and Eskort’s Kiddos (late 2025) come in white ribbed punnets, featuring cartoon characters, as well as fun fonts and artwork in bright colours.

Supplied/ARB

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Eskort must change the packaging of its crumbed pork range aimed at children within three months, after losing a final appeal before the Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB).

The company has been in a long-running battle with Rainbow Chicken, which accused Eskort of copying the packaging for its Chickees chicken range.

Both Chickees (launched in 2023) and Eskort’s Kiddos (launched in late 2025) come in white ribbed punnets featuring cartoon characters, fun fonts and bright-coloured artwork.

Eskort argued that these elements were common creative conventions in the children’s food category and could not be claimed as proprietary to Rainbow.

Rainbow countered that the similarities were not generic and that Eskort’s own internal emails showed that its team had expressly referred to Chickees in its development.

In recent months, both the ARB and its appeals committee ruled against Eskort, finding that its packaging was too similar to Rainbow’s and ordering that it must be changed.

Eskort then turned to ARB’s final appeals committee, contending that local law protects only the original advertising concept and that Rainbow had to prove that its Chickees packaging contained such a concept.

But the final appeals committee, chaired by retired Judge Bernard Ngoepe, found that Chickees appears to have been the blueprint for Eskort’s packaging, and that it had been copied in such a recognisable way that it is likely to result in a loss of advertising value for Rainbow.

Eskort has been ordered to change its packaging within three months of the ruling date (7 September 2026).