ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Switzerland’s largest chocolate company, Migros-owned Frey, has just acquired Sweetworks in Buffalo, New York and its sister firm Oak Leaf Confections in Toronto, Canada to increase its presence in North America, notably in northern US states and Canada.

The deal is retroactive to 1 January and involves no changes in personnel or the number of employees, which total 450. The companies will continue to concentrate on their chocolate and chewing gum businesses.

In other sweets industry news German confectioner Haribo has lost a court case that has been running for months over Swiss Lindt & Sprungli’s use of “gold teddies” to describe their gold foil wrapped chocolate bears.

“The court of appeal in Cologne on Friday found that Lindt’s foil-wrapped chocolate teddies could not be mistaken for Haribo’s trademark jelly sweets,” reports MSN.

“Bonn-based Haribo had argued that the chocolate teddies, wrapped in gold foil, were a “three-dimensional representation of the words ‘gold bear’.”

But the court rejected Haribo’s arguments, pointing out that Lindt’s logo was clearly visible on the packaging and the teddies were much closer in appearance to the Swiss chocolate-maker’s own “gold bunnies” that are sold at Easter.”