Wegmans Fish Shop stole my concept, merchant claims

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we take a look at a small fish market in Manhattan, whose owner says the supermarket chain Wegmans has copied his operations in a new store nearby. We will also get details about developments in some cases involving Donald Trump.

Sakanayain the Wegmans supermarket on Astor Place, says it is “a fish market like no other.”

Yuji Haraguchi disagrees, saying it’s a fish market like his, Osakana, a few blocks away.

Last month, he sued Wegmans and a number of smaller food-related companies, accusing them of illegally copying his concepts. Wegmans said his lawsuit was “without merit,” and now the other defendants in his lawsuit have contradicted him.

Haraguchi’s lawsuit, filed in Manhattan State Supreme Court, said Sakanaya had “an uncanny and confusing resemblance” to his store: Osakana means “fish” in Japanese, and Sakanaya means “fish shop.” Even the typography on Sakanaya’s signs was the same as Osakana’s, the lawsuit said.

“A lot of people thought it was me” when Sakanaya opened because “the name was so close,” he told me. Haraguchi says this in a petition on the change.org website that he hadn’t known Sakanaya was coming. He found out when someone sent him a message that said, “Congratulations on the opening of Osakana in Wegman.”

“That’s how I found out that they were secretly opening an identical concept called ‘Sakanaya’ behind my back,” he wrote in the petition, which had just over 4,700 signatures as of Monday. He told me his sales dropped 30 percent when the Wegmans store opened.

His lawsuit accused Wegmans and the other companies of co-founding Sakanaya and having a “scheme to defraud him” after he decided to sell Osakana last year.

His lawsuit said he signed a non-disclosure agreement last August with Culinary collaborations, a seafood supplier that Haraguchi said was Wegmans’ seafood broker. “I relied on Wegman’s recognition, presence and credibility,” Haraguchi said in the petition. “Without a doubt, I believed that I could make Osakana grow even better and stronger with them.”

But — according to the countersuit — Culinary Collaborations decided it wasn’t interested and in September “passed on the opportunity” to Red Shell Sushi, a California-based supplier. “To keep the scam going and not raise questions,” according to Haraguchi’s lawsuit, Red Shell Sushi asked Haraguchi in November to prepare a draft purchase agreement for Osakana.

A week later, Culimer USA, a food marketing and distribution company that was also involved in the talks for Osakana, “decided in summary that it was no longer interested in purchasing Osakana,” according to the Haraguchi lawsuit. The Wegmans store, which includes Sakanaya, opened in October.

“They never disclosed that they were in direct competition with my store,” Haraguchi said. “If they had told me they were doing it, I would never have accepted their letter of intent.”

An attorney for the companies named in Haraguchi’s lawsuit, excluding Wegmans, called his allegations “baseless and retaliatory.” The attorney, B. Kevin Burke Jr., said in a statement that the lawsuit was “nothing more than an attempt by Mr. Haraguchi to unjustly enrich himself by defaming the defendants in the media and online in the hope of a settlement to force.”

Their countersuit accused Haraguchi of “online rants” on Instagram and change.org, falsely accusing Wegmans and the other companies of fraud, trademark infringement and unfair competition. The countersuit also presented several details about the discussions surrounding Osakana’s sale, including that it was Haraguchi who walked away from the deal to sell, and not Red Shell Sushi.

A spokeswoman for Wegmans, which is not a plaintiff in the countersuit, said by email that the company was “confident” that Haraguchi’s original lawsuit was “without merit.” She said that as of 2022, Wegmans had worked with Uoriki, a high-end fishmonger and retailer in Tokyo that is a defendant in Haraguchi’s lawsuit and a plaintiff in the countersuit. Wegmans finalized the supply chain and training plans for Sakanaya last June. she said.

Weather

Expect a sunny day with temperatures reaching the low 60s. At night, temperatures will drop to the mid 40s with partly cloudy skies.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until March 24 (Purim).

A whirlwind of statements and legal maneuvers around several Manhattan courts Monday reflected Donald Trump’s ongoing entanglements.

• Around lunchtime it emerged that his lawyers had tried to postpone his upcoming criminal trial, in which he is accused of covering up a possible sex scandal and a payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, raised the possibility of a new trial after lashing out at Carroll over the weekend and Monday, using the same derogatory language that led to a defamation verdict and $83.3 million judgment in January dollars in the first case. Caroll submitted.

Trump complained Saturday about the bond he had to post to prevent Carroll from collecting the $83.3 million as he appealed the verdict, telling the crowd at a rally in Rome, Georgia, that Carroll was “not a credible person ‘ used to be.

Then on Monday on CNBC, he derisively referred to Carroll as “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman” — a reference to the department store where Carroll said he attacked her, an encounter that was discussed in a related case last year. The jury in that case ordered him to pay her $5.5 million.

Trump said on CNBC that the decisions against him were “ridiculous.” “I was indicted — I was charged with a false accusation and had to post $91 million bail on a false accusation,” said Trump, who was in fact not criminally charged in the case. The $91 million was a reference to the $83.3 million judgment bond, plus interest.

METROPOLITAN diary

‘Gigantor’

Dear Diary:

I jumped into a cab on Park Avenue South on a dreary, gray Thursday in the 1930s. The driver was friendly and we started talking about the lack of snow in New York City.

Somehow the conversation ended up in an old episode of ‘Twilight Zone’. Realizing that we were the same age, the taxi driver asked if I knew who Gigantor was.

Did I know who Gigantor was?

“Gigantor, Gigantor, Gigaaaantooor, Gigantor, the space age robot,” I sang. “He’s at your command.”

As we walked up Park Avenue, we broke into another: “Come and listen to the story about a man named Jed, a poor mountain climber who could barely feed his family…”

We turned left onto 57th Street and shifted gears again.

“Meet George Jetson,” we sang, “his son, Elroy; daughter Judy; Jane, his wife.’