First of all, as regards ingredients, and in particularly additives, both patents and (often preferably) the protection of trade secrets are widely used and require great care to avoid loss of rights2. Of course, recipes can also be protected through confidentiality, since, if they are released, the copyright protection is limited to their expression, but does not cover the idea. Even more important is the protection of manufacturing (and often also commercial) know-how, which needs to be taken care of not only in contentious contexts, but primarily, upstream of them, in strategic advice for the most appropriate protection choices, including through the registration of design and model and trademark, as well as for labelling and communication. To this purpose, particular relevance is assumed by the contractual profiles, not only concerning the exploitation of these creations, but also the definition of the respective rights of the different subjects who have contributed, often in different but complementary roles, to these new creations, in order to avoid conflicts that could undermine the effective protection against their exploitation by unauthorised third parties. II. THE INCREASING IMPORTANCE OF FOOD DESIGN Design and even light design have become increasingly important in the food sector, to the point that new expressions, Food Design and Food Lighting, are being coined to indicate respectively the design of foods and packaging thereof and lighting projects and systems applied to food; and even though there are still no decisions that have dealt specifically with the latter issue, this does not mean that there are no possible forms of legal protection for this forms of expression, in which the technical and artistic aspects are closely linked: forms of protection that, once again, must be “built” from general, correctly interpreted standards. First of all, the outward appearance and also the presentation of the products on the plate can in fact be protected as designs, that EU law protects them either as a result of a registration as model/design (and in this case the protection can last 25 years), or as a result of their disclosure to interested circles of the 2 See Court of Milan, July 1st 2005, which issued a protective measure to protect trade secrets consisting precisely of the formulas of blends of natural ingredients that the claimant provided to its customers, customizing them according to their peculiar needs and which they then used in the industrial production of their food products. See also Court of Venice, November 25, 2022, which protected a patent related to the use of a solution to be added by injection to an industrial bakery product in order to maintain its softness properties substantially unchanged throughout its shelf life. 266 CESARE GALLI
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