Search fails when text contains trademark ® character

We have a webpage with a search field that uses ES.
As a user types, possible candidate values appear for them to select.

There are some words with the reserved character ® next to it that is causing no results to appear at all.
(FYI, we save the character as an HTML: "&#174" value).

As an example:
HappyPete's® Famous Cookies
(saved in the data store as "HappyPete's&#174 Famous Cookies")

As the user types "HappyPete's" nothing appears.
To fix it, we don't want to strip the HTML in the ES data store, because it's needed elsewhere.

So how do we get the "HappyPete's® Famous Cookies" value to appear in the results, without the need to type the special ® character?

Thanks.

We save the ® as & # 1 7 4