Pod Insights The Sporkful A Battle Over The Secret Of Nooks And Crannies About this episode Thomas’ English Muffins are so famous for their nooks and crannies that the recipe that produces those iconic features is a closely guarded trade secret. Only a select group of people know it, and as you’ll hear in this week’s show, when one of those people took a job at a competitor, all hell broke loose.
Transcript 6,431 words · 22 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:06 Dan Pashman? This episode contains explicit language.
1:09 Speaker 02 Do you know what one of the best kept trade secrets is? And everybody thinks Coke. And I'm like, wow, Thomas's English muffins, which we've all grown up on, there's only 10 people in the world that know how to make a Thomas's English muffin. And people go, what?
1:23 Dan Pashman? This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Let me tell you, if you didn't know already, I love me a Thomas's English muffin. I love the nooks and crannies, how they get toasty and they create these crags and crevices that hold extra butter and add more texture. And it turns out the famous nooks and crannies are not just a unique selling point for Thomas's. They're trademarked. And as of here today, they were once at the center of one of the most important legal cases that you've probably never heard of. There's just a tiny group of people who know the secret behind Thomas's English muffins. And when one of those folks took a job at a competitor, all hell broke loose. And I should say, this story comes from our friends at Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell's
2:06 Dan Pashman? excellent podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, Revisionist History's senior producer, Ben Nadeff-Haferi, examines the beloved Thomas's English muffin. Now, this is part one of the story. Head to the Revisionist History feed to hear part two, in which Ben attempts to reverse engineer the coveted Thomas's recipe. Okay, here's Malcolm Gladwell.
2:29 Speaker 03 Hold on, let's take a little bite here.
2:33 Speaker 03 One morning, not long ago, my colleague Ben Nadaf Hafray and I huddled in a small backroom at Pushkin Industries to solve a mystery.
2:42 Speaker 04 It like hits the back of your palate. There's like a funk to it. You know what I mean?
2:47 Speaker 03 Through the glass wall of the room, we could see our fellow Pushkinites working on various prosaic podcasts and audiobooks while we alone wrestled with an eternal question involving toasted bread. Just from a sensory perspective, there's a lot of crunch. Let's also not forget its size.
3:09 Speaker 04 Yes.
3:10 Speaker 03 Because it's palatable. It's palatable. Breakfast is the meal you make when you're barely conscious. So the breakfast table is a Super Bowl for food companies. Lunch is eaten out. Dinner, if you're lucky, is prepared from scratch. But think about breakfast. All the day lies before you and you are in need of sustenance. You want something wholesome, but crucially, easy, a little ready-made. Breakfast foods become lifelong habits. Brands fight tooth and nail for a prime spot at that table. Many have fought valiantly. Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Pop Tarts, Rice Krispies. But there's only one breakfast item legendary enough that when I take a bite, suddenly I remember my childhood.
3:56 Speaker 03 Also, how my father felt about cutting the crust off bread. I think he, I think he viewed that as a kind of a sign of, as a kind of an defeat move, a sign of, a sign of moral weakness, moral and sort of a lack of real kind of fiber when it came to eating your food. Or Ben takes a bite and suddenly he's off for the millionth time about Proust.
4:20 Speaker 04 It does have that kind of like Proustian association thing. Like it tastes like I, this, I remember this taste.
4:27 Speaker 03 Yes.
4:27 Speaker 04 When I have this, it like, it does take me back. Like I am seeing my family's kitchen where we would eat breakfast and like the big spread.
4:37 Speaker 03 Our breakfast mystery comes in packages of six, but they cannot be eaten right out of the box. Each item inside must be split in two, then toasted, then buttered for the magic to work. And oh, the magic works. I'm talking, of course, about Thomas's English Muffins, the most iconic breakfast bread of all time.
5:03 Speaker 04 And for that reason, it is nearly a half a billion dollar a year in sales product. It is the sine qua non of bread products, baked goods.
5:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:14 Speaker 04 The champ, undisputed.
5:16 Speaker 03 What sets the Thomas's English Muffin apart from all the others? It says right there on the package, nooks and crannies. The recipe for Thomas's English Muffin has been one of the most closely held trade secrets there is, until allegedly one baking executive tried to make off with the family's jewels.
5:41 Speaker 03 Today on the show, Ben Nidap Hafri peers into the nooks and crannies of one of the greatest legal cases you've never heard of. It's a big story, this muffin case. Today, we're getting part one.
5:58 Speaker 03 Here's Ben.
5:59 Speaker 04 I once hired a lawyer who dreams about suing people. He told me this on a call once. I asked for proof and he showed me a video of himself asleep, very clearly muttering, "I'll sue you." And something to the effect of, "You're going to jail." There were some swears in there, too. My first thought was, this man is the best lawyer I'll ever have. Second thought, I better pay him quickly. We were going over an employment contract. We got to the part about intellectual property and I thought the degree to which an employer could punish you if you ever divulged one of their trade secrets seemed a little crazy, to which my lawyer replied, "Well, it's nooks and crannies." And even recognizing I was paying by the second, I was like, "What did you just say?"
6:45 Speaker 05 Why have so many of you switched from toast to Thomas's English Muffins?
6:49 Speaker 06 Definitely the cranny.
6:51 Speaker 05 It was the nooks.
6:52 Speaker 04 The key to English muffin supremacy comes down to the balance of nooks, which catch and pool the melted butter and the thin, crisp walls of the crannies. But somehow, nooks and crannies are now lawyer shorthand for trade secret. Why?
7:08 Speaker 05 Thomas's, the nooks and crannies muffin, making breakfast better for over 100 years.
7:16 Speaker 04 In 1874, a baker named Samuel Bath Thomas left England for the United States. Little's known about his life before he lands in New York, but he arrived with a recipe in his pocket for what typically would be called Welsh muffins or crumpets. He cooked them on a griddle so they'd be crisp on the outside and doughy yet pockmarked in the inside in a way few other breads were. Thomas's Nooks and Crannies took New York by storm. Demand skyrocketed. He opened another bakery. Then it became a corporation. Eventually, the words nooks and crannies became a registered trademark of Thomas's English Muffins. You will note, if you look at the bakery shelves at your local grocery store,
8:00 Speaker 04 that other English muffin brands live in fear of this fact. Dave's Killer Bread boasts of butter-catching flavor craters. Trader Joe's has pockets and crevices. Bays has raised the white flag and left the field entirely with a claim about packaging now resealable. Because all of them know better than to cross the entity that now owns Thomas's: Grupo Bimbo.
8:26 Speaker 06 Did you know that your bread is owned by Mexico? CNBC's Michelle Caruso Cabrera caught up with the nation's largest bakery, Grupo Bimbo.
8:34 Speaker 04 Grupo Bimbo, international baking conglomerate.
8:37 Speaker 07 Entenmann's? Mm-hmm. Owned by a Mexican bread company. Sara Lee, bought by a Mexican bread company. Grupo Bimbo is just the biggest baker in the United States. It is the biggest baker in the entire world. Wow.
8:49 Speaker 04 Bimbo is everywhere. They've taken over half the bread brands you've heard of and 50% of the rest. They've swept through the US, acquiring one bakery after another.
8:59 Speaker 07 It's the first bakery with a big national footprint, and they plan to be global.
9:04 Speaker 04 No one stands in the way of Grupo Bimbo. And in 2009, at the height of their powers, they acquired the holy grail of baked goods, the nooks and crannies.
9:15 Speaker 07 Thomas's English Muffins, owned by a Mexican bread company.
9:19 Speaker 04 The secret recipe for nooks and crannies brought in about half a billion dollars in annual revenue to Grupo Bimbo. But then, according to Bimbo, someone tried to steal it.
9:33 Speaker 04 Can you just tell me the the basic facts of the case?
9:37 Speaker 02 Well, in this case, I guess we can go through it.
9:40 Speaker 04 I'm speaking with Louis Del Giudice, partner at the major law firm Troutman Pepper Locke in a conference room high above Manhattan. This is where my lawyer sent me when I asked about cranny law. Louis is an expert in intellectual property. He says a lot of people come to him to determine if they have their own trade secrets. And he tells them, "Sit down, my friends, and let me teach you the lessons of the muffin."
10:06 Speaker 02 Do you know what one of the best kept trade secrets is? And everybody thinks Coke. And I'm like, well, Thomas's English Muffins, which we've all grown up on, there's only 10 people in the world that know how to make a Thomas's English muffin. And people go, what?
10:18 Speaker 04 Actually, it's fewer than 10, but we'll get to that. Trade secrets are one of the pillars of IP protection in the United States, along with patents, trademarks, and copyright. But unlike the others, a trade secret never expires. And the muffin case is one of the best examples of a trade secret's power and how to protect it. Louis was not involved in the case directly, but he's studied it at length. In any telling, he begins by introducing the defendant, a former Grupo Bimbo employee named Chris Botticella.
10:51 Speaker 02 Executive officer. He's in charge of the entire West Coast of the United States. And he's privy to all this information, all the recipe books, and all of this other financial information and efficiencies. He has to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but that nondisclosure agreement's only while he's employed.
11:10 Speaker 04 It's 2010, the year after Grupo Bimbo acquired Thomas's. According to documents presented in court, the information required to produce a Thomas's English muffin is known by only seven people at the company. It's kept in secret code books that only a few people have access to. Baracella, as a senior executive, is one of those people. He oversees a facility in Placentia, California, where the muffins are made. He's been in the industry since he was 16 and has risen through the ranks through sheer skill, till finally, he's reached the pinnacle. Bimbo Bakery's executive of almost a decade. But lately, Chris has been unhappy.
11:51 Speaker 02 He had said that they had done some cost-cutting and some head-cutting, so that sort of left a bad taste in his mouth. It sounded like, from the one email that's attached to the complaint, that maybe he had a little bit of friction with his manager, you know, the guy above him. He's just like, you know, there's a line that literally says, you know, "You and I may not have always seen eye to eye, but we've always known what was best for the company." So when you read that, you know, that's a polite way of saying, "You and I used to fight a lot."
12:22 Speaker 04 Chris gets a job offer at Hostess, famed owner of Twinkies. One of Bimbo's only competitors, but just barely. Hostess had just gone through bankruptcy. Hostess was a possible target for Bimbo acquisition, but then Bimbo would have owned almost every baked good on the planet, and at that point, where's the fun? Chris probably knew that Grupo Bimbo wasn't going to be thrilled about the Hostess of it all, but he wants to get his year-end bonus, so he doesn't leave right away.
12:49 Speaker 02 So now he's sitting all through Q4 at his role at Thomas's, getting all the Q4 information, all the look-forward information for the next year, all the financials, on top of all the other knowledge he had.
13:04 Speaker 04 Chris signs with Hostess in October. His start date is January. The weeks tick by. Chris finally announces he's leaving Bimbo, but he doesn't say he's going to a new job. Given his long tenure, his colleagues probably assume he's retiring. According to court documents, he asked about how to enroll in health coverage.
13:22 Speaker 02 Oh, I need Cobra, meaning like that's code word for like, I'm gonna retire almost, right?
13:27 Speaker 04 But then Hostess puts out a press release.
13:31 Speaker 02 They helped find out from Hostess's press release that he's gonna work in the next two days for Hostess.
13:37 Speaker 04 And Bimbo's like, oh shit.
13:39 Speaker 02 We've got this 75-year-old-plus secret of how to bake Thomas's English muffins. It's a half a billion-dollar product, and he knows it.
13:47 Speaker 04 Does Hostess have an English muffin? Not yet. Fuck. HR calls Chris.
13:51 Speaker 02 No, no, you weren't retiring. You were going to the hated competitor.
13:55 Speaker 04 This is bad. HR says, get out now.
13:58 Speaker 02 He got to a certain point where he knew too much, and now he's iced out.
14:03 Speaker 04 Chris is walked out of the building. He has no idea what's coming for him. Least of all, that he's about to be swallowed up by the nooks and crannies. We'll be right back.
14:18 Speaker 08 Ooh, advertisements. Yummy.
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16:19 Dan Pashman? Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, we talked all about the kolache, the traditional Czech pastry that got a foothold in Texas after a wave of Czech immigrants came to the state more than a century ago. Now, in Texas, the kolache is as common as a donut, but it's relatively unknown outside the Lone Star State. Two people are trying to change that. Sarah Morgan Ashy and her husband Paul Ashy own King's Kolache in Brooklyn, and they're betting that kolaches can get a lot bigger than Texas.
16:46 Speaker 15 I think that everyone, everyone is born ready for this amazing... Because every culture has some version of a kolache, and it's, you know, they're, they're easy to eat. They're crushable. They're delicious. They're good breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack. So are they ready? Yeah, they might not know they're ready yet.
17:06 Dan Pashman? I've always been ready.
17:07 Speaker 15 But they were born ready.
17:08 Dan Pashman? That's right. I didn't just take their word for it. I went to King's Kolache with a friend of mine, a proud hardcore Texan, and we ate the kolaches together so I could get his take on how authentic they were. That episode's up now. Check it out. All right, back to the show. Here again is Revisionist History's senior producer Ben Natt of Hafrey.
17:27 Speaker 04 We're going to return to the nooks and grannies, I promise. But first, we have to talk about Willy Wonka.
17:34 Speaker 16 So I'll start by saying that one of my favorite books as a kid was Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
17:42 Speaker 04 Jeanne C. Fromer is a vice dean at the New York University Law School. She's also the Walter J. Durenberg Professor of Intellectual Property Law and a scholar of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
17:53 Speaker 16 When my kids were younger, I was rereading the book to them. And I was struck, now that I was working in intellectual property, by how much of the story was actually driven by trade secrets in that Willy Wonka had had to shut down his factory because all of his competitors were sneaking in spies to work there so they could steal his amazing candy innovations. And he couldn't tolerate it as a business matter anymore, so he shut down.
18:26 Speaker 04 For those in need of a refresher, in the book, Wonka's factory has started back up, but nobody understands how. Nobody ever goes in, nobody ever comes out. This is why it's so exciting when Charlie gets the golden ticket to go see the inside of the factory. Nobody sees the inside of the factory.
18:43 Speaker 16 And so what we learn is that Willy Wonka has found the magical solution to trade secret theft by having Oompa Loompas work in the factory. Why are they the magical solution? Because they don't leave, they live there, so they're not going to be sneaking out any trade secrets. They're paid in chocolate, they're happy. Let's not talk about the, some of the racist and other aspects.
19:09 Speaker 04 It may be in violation of some employment law, but it's...
19:13 Speaker 16 Totally.
19:20 Speaker 04 Jeannie's insight about the Oompa Loompas became the seed of not one, but two brilliant articles she wrote, using Willy Wonka as the skeleton key for understanding trade secrecy. Her major revelation? Willy Wonka's paranoia, the spying and extreme secrecy, was totally justified. It was essentially based on a true story. This is just part of being in the candy industry.
19:43 Speaker 16 Everything from reading about the Mars Company, blindfolding any repair people that would come in to fix machines so they wouldn't see anything else, to spies being put into factories and guarding against that. So it felt actually very true to life, and that was a little bit shocking to me.
20:02 Speaker 04 Trade secrecy is the part of the law where life begins to resemble Willy Wonka.
20:08 Speaker 17 This is the most secret machine in my entire factory.
20:12 Speaker 11 But what's it do?
20:13 Speaker 17 Can't you see it makes everlasting gobstoppers?
20:16 Speaker 11 Did you say everlasting?
20:17 Speaker 04 People love secrets from a very early age. It's why Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a classic children's story. It's not just the candy, it's the secrets. The world is already full of things you can't understand when you're little, and now someone's going to share the most special, true knowledge behind it all?
20:37 Speaker 04 But secrets are also dangerous. If I tell you a secret, it means I trust you. It binds us together, but it also alters the balance of power between us. You know something I don't want other people to know? That puts me at risk. So I need you to know it's a secret. I tell you, don't tell anyone, before I whisper in your ear. I put up a sign on my bedroom door saying, "Top secret, keep out." Trade secrecy works on playground rules.
21:07 Speaker 17 I can only give them to you if you solemnly swear to keep them for yourselves and never show them to another living soul as long as you all shall live. Agreed?
21:17 Speaker 11 Agreed.
21:20 Speaker 04 Now imagine I'm a major corporation in the real world. I'm infinitely more powerful than you. I'm Willy Wonka and you are an Oompa Loompa. I tell you a secret, maybe one you don't even want to know. And then I say, by the way, I have eyes everywhere. And if you breathe a word of this secret to anyone, or even look as if you might breathe a word, I will destroy you. This is the crux of it. At their best, trade secrets protect valuable intellectual property from being stolen. But at their worst, they're a powerful tool for a company that wants to turn an employee into an Oompa Loompa. It used to be the easiest way to turn a human being into an Oompa Loompa was a non-compete clause.
22:03 Speaker 04 But Janie says that's going away.
22:06 Speaker 16 We've been living in a world where fast food workers have been asked to sign non-compete agreements. And, you know, historically, people understood non-compete as being for the a small number of employees, the highest level employees, the ones with the access to the most sensitive information. And they're just being deployed as form contracts for so many workers and workers with lower incomes in ways that are keeping them in jobs that they might want to leave and go somewhere else.
22:40 Speaker 04 A lot of states are banning non-compete now, which is one of the reasons a company might come to Louis Del Giudice's IP expert to help identify and protect their secrets. Could you make that bit in a secret room? Can you have a black vault in the office? Could there be a secret code book?
22:56 Speaker 02 Because a trade secret will be the only way to stop somebody if you really think they're taking something that's proprietary to your company someplace else. Because a non-compete's not going to really be in play.
23:09 Speaker 04 But trade secrets can have a dangerous power.
23:13 Speaker 16 Sometimes people are just good at what they do and they have advantages to continue working in the same industry because they know that industry. And their business has overclaimed things as secrets and that might prevent them from taking another job.
23:33 Speaker 04 Trade secrets are the only intellectual property protection that can last forever. And because of that permanence and the way we're geared to think about secrets already, they have a kind of mystical aura. In our secular, disenchanted world, they are the closest thing we have to magic.
23:52 Speaker 10 The authentic Coca-Cola formula is written on a tiny grain of rice, kept in an old Lincoln chest with a curse on anyone who opens it.
24:02 Speaker 04 The most famous ones are the recipes. Coca-Cola's secret formula, KFC's 11 spices, the exact way to create Wrigley's gum. But actually, a whole lot of things can be trade secrets. Software code, financial information. You may know a trade secret and not even totally realize it. But a good way to recognize one is the nooks and crannies test. This feels like a good transition to me to Bimbo Bakeries versus Botticella. Can you tell me how you came across the case and how you teach it?
24:35 Speaker 16 I know the case through working on trade secret scholarship and teaching. It's a more recent classic, I would say.
24:45 Speaker 04 Bimbo Bakeries versus Botticella. It seemed like every lawyer I talked to knew about the case. It wasn't a precedent so much as a legend, a piece of lore, a fairy tale warning about the Oompa Loompa who took the everlasting gobstopper out of Willy Wonka's factory and tried to sell it to a competitor. Like any good fairy tale, it's a good teaching tool because the moral's clear. Except, then I realized, the lessons of this case aren't clear at all.
25:25 Speaker 04 If somehow you missed the 2017 edition of the Pennsylvania Super Lawyers Magazine, I would encourage you to look it up. Specifically, an article titled "I Can Do That", about a Pennsylvania super lawyer named Elizabeth Ainsley. Liz Ainsley is fearless. She was head of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania's fraud team. As Super Lawyers Magazine puts it, quote, "Ainsley has represented whistleblowers in several major cases, defended and prosecuted high-profile RICO cases against law firms and pharmaceutical companies, defended a major national bank in a lender liability trial, and successfully defended the New York Times in a federal defamation trial." End quote. Legend. And yet, in that whole article, they don't mention a call she got
26:10 Speaker 04 sometime in January 2010 regarding a secret recipe for English muffins.
26:15 Speaker 18 It was a pretty small budget to begin with. So, and I was at a big firm. So there was some question about whether I could take it or not, but they, they let me take it.
26:25 Speaker 04 When you say let you take it, were you eager to take it?
26:29 Speaker 18 Yeah. It was an interesting case. It was kind of a David and Goliath situation. I thought people ought to be free to move from one employer to another. And Chris seemed to be out of his depth.
26:46 Speaker 04 How so?
26:47 Speaker 18 Well, that he was a single person and being sued by a huge corporation.
26:56 Speaker 04 Global conglomerate.
26:57 Speaker 18 Absolutely. Was, was the deepest of pockets.
27:02 Speaker 04 Chris Potatella, as I have mentioned, was in trouble. Bimbo Bakeries has just found out that one of seven employees who knew the secret recipe for their newly acquired and extremely valuable Thomas's English muffins was going to work for a competitor. Grupo Bimbo is one of the largest bakeries in the world. Grupo Bimbo bows to nobody. So, within days of Chris's termination, before he starts his new job at Hostess, attorneys for Bimbo file an injunction in a Pennsylvania court, which is technically where Thomas's is based, but mainly it's a way better place for them to argue the case than California. I would like to read to you from the factual allegations section of what they filed. Items one through 10 cover the basics of the case, and then they get to the secret.
27:49 Speaker 04 BBU and its predecessors have gone to great lengths to keep secret the recipe and process for making Thomas's English muffins for over 75 years. Thomas's English muffins are a unique product famous for their distinctive nooks and crannies characteristics. As a result of his employment, Botticella learned trade secrets relating to the production of the Thomas's English muffins, including not only its recipe, but also the equipment necessary for production, necessary moisture level, and the way the product is baked, which all contribute to its distinctive characteristics. "With the knowledge described in paragraph 13, Botticella could produce an English muffin that might look a bit different, but that would nevertheless possess the distinctive
28:32 Speaker 04 taste, texture, and flavor character that distinguish the Thomas's English muffins, and that have been the foundation of the product's success." End quote. If you're Chris, this is bad.
28:47 Speaker 02 Because you have to remember, the judge is coming to this cold.
28:53 Speaker 04 Louis Del Giudice, partner, Troutman Pepper Locke, muffin trade secret enthusiast.
28:58 Speaker 02 He knows nothing about what's going on. He gets a slice of paper that's, you know, this emergency order on top of his desk that says, "We need you to act now, and we need you to stop somebody from getting a job." Right? That's a pretty tall order to ask a judge to do. And the judge looks at it and says, "Thomas's English muffins. Oh, the nooks and crannies."
29:17 Speaker 04 An immediately recognizable trade secret. Absolutely, you can't let someone take the secret behind the greatest breakfast product of all time. The judge grants Bimbo's wish. Chris can't join Hostess till the case is heard. Meanwhile, Grupo Bimbo has hired a computer forensics expert who starts looking through Chris's laptop.
29:35 Speaker 02 Right after he got off the phone with HR, when they said, "Hey, we heard the announcement from Hostess," all of a sudden, three flash drives ends up getting plugged into the laptop.
29:44 Speaker 04 When confronted with this information, Chris told the court he was practicing for his new job. The court is like, "Are you serious?"
29:51 Speaker 02 I was practicing for my new job, how to copy stuff onto a flash drive and take it off the flash drive and put it back on the flash. He's got, you know, you figure he's in his late 50s, he's not good with technology. But yeah, so the court found that a little bit unbelievable, that he was practicing.
30:09 Speaker 04 Chris conceded that it was complicated, but there are mitigating factors here. First, the rush of it all and the fact that he'd just met Liz, his lawyer. Then, two, he'd signed a document with Hostess saying that he wouldn't share any confidential Bimbo information. He said he'd stuck around because he wanted to get his year-end bonus and finish two projects he was working on, but the court was not convinced.
30:31 Speaker 02 There's not a lot of confusion or new law that was made. It's just everything's really black and white.
30:42 Speaker 04 This is the classic version of the case. Black and white. Bimbo catches muffin thief accuses executive of stealing all sorts of trade secrets. Except his lawyer Liz says, if you look at those documents, there's no evidence of that.
30:55 Speaker 18 I saw all of that stuff and none of it had anything to do with the products that Bimbo produced. It had nothing to do with not only English muffins, but also, you know, cupcakes or anything else.
31:11 Speaker 04 Nah, sandwich thins.
31:12 Speaker 18 Yeah, exactly.
31:14 Speaker 04 Liz says, sure. In those documents, there's financial information, cost-saving strategies, et cetera, confidential stuff, but that's in a different category than the ancient muffin trade secret.
31:27 Speaker 19 I can actually read it to you, this section. Okay, so documents in Exhibits nine through 25 include Bimbo's cost-reduction strategies, product launch dates, anticipated plant and line closures, labor contract information, production strengths and weaknesses of many Bimbo bakeries, and the cost structures for individual products by brand.
31:46 Speaker 18 Right.
31:47 Speaker 19 All of this documentation is highly confidential, even within Bimbo, and would be extremely harmful to Bimbo in the hands of the competitor. You don't think that's sufficient?
31:55 Speaker 18 I agree that it was confidential. It's confidential, but it's not a trade secret.
32:00 Speaker 04 Bimbo leads with the nooks and crannies in the muffins, but in all the fine print of their complaint, nary a nook nor a cranny. And yet Liz thinks that's really what this was all about.
32:12 Speaker 18 Anytime that any executive leaves a big company and goes to another company, he'll be taking with him the knowledge that he's acquired of how to be a chief executive or a senior executive. You can't say that that's a secret just because he's learned it at one company. I did think that they wanted to maybe make a statement to people at Bimbo who might be thinking of stealing or peddling the English muffin secret, you know, that they were going to pursue them.
32:45 Speaker 04 What anyone on the outside of the case knows is the result. Chris got crushed. If you search this case online, you'll see an example made of it on all sorts of law firm websites. You'll find it in an introductory textbook for intellectual property law. But in none of those will you hear whether Bimbo Bakeries was truly able to hold its most legendary secret up under scrutiny. Because the case never went to trial. It was meant to go to trial. But Liz told me there wasn't money for a trial.
33:19 Speaker 04 The judge ruled in favor of Bimbo. Hostess told the New York Times, "We have a business to run. We have to move on." Liz appealed the case and lost. The ruling stood.
33:32 Speaker 04 Now, I'll grant you that Chris was not an ideal defendant. But this case had real consequences for his life.
33:39 Speaker 02 After the fact that said, "You go anywhere near the baking industry, you have to tell Thomases that you're going to be employed there." And which means Thomases now would have the right to go to court and get some subpoenas and ask questions of the new employer. And what is he going to do? Like, what is this poor guy, if you want to take his side of the story, what is this poor guy supposed to do? Because now he have a set of handcuffs on. He has to continue to work and can't go anywhere else, which is essentially what happened to him. No one's going to touch that guy now with a 10-foot pole.
34:10 Speaker 04 Bimbo didn't respond to a request for comment by the time we recorded this episode. I tried for months to reach Chris Spodichella. Finally, I found an address, and I wrote him a letter. He wrote me an email in which he described traveling to the hearing across the country, even though he lived in California, scrambling to pay for the appeal, and going bankrupt. He writes, quote, "You will never understand the impact that this had on my personal and professional life."
34:40 Speaker 04 What first grabbed me about this story was the idea that the nooks and crannies of a Thomas's English muffin had some supercharged legal power. But by this point, after reporting the story, I realized what this had meant, at least to Chris. And when I talked to Louis and Jeannie about the future of trade secrecy, I saw a world of trade secrets opening up before me, a once futuristic and medieval, where every company had mystical code books full of secret recipes, a nook and cranny for every employee.
35:16 Speaker 04 Nooks and crannies is a shorthand for trade secret, but the actual trade secret of the nooks and crannies never came before a jury. I had learned that this controversy was, to my mind, unresolved. So we at Revisionist History decided to resolve it.
35:37 Speaker 04 We are trying to free the muffin, so we're
35:39 Speaker 19 Okay.
35:40 Speaker 04 We're reverse-engineering the muffin recipe.
35:42 Speaker 19 Whoa, I kind of love this. Okay.
35:44 Speaker 04 You can't, don't tell people that because we're doing that. Next week, we attempt to crack the code of the English muffin.
35:51 Speaker 08 My question for you is, is this like you're trying to like create their exact product?
35:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, can we make this exact English muffin?
36:03 Dan Pashman? That was part one of Revisionist History's series on the secret recipe for Thomas's English muffins. Head over to the Revisionist History feed to hear part two, where Ben attempts to reverse-engineer the recipe. Listen to Revisionist History wherever you get your podcasts. Next week here on The Sporkful, Thomas Keller is one of the most acclaimed chefs in America, but over the last few years, his restaurants have gotten a series of negative reviews. This past April, he confronted a critic at one of his restaurants, and things took a strange turn. That story, next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's episode about the Texas check pastry, the kolache. In Texas, it's as common as a donut, but it's practically unknown outside the state. Can the kolache get bigger than Texas? We try to find out. Now here's Ben with the Revisionist History credits.
36:46 Speaker 04 Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Madoff-Hafry, with Lucy Sullivan and Nina Byrne-Lawrence. This episode was edited by Julia Barton. Special thanks to Jake Flanagan, Jordan Manikin, Greta Cohn, and Sarah Nix. Fact-checking on this episode by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Louis Garra. Mixing and mastering by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Ben Natafafri.
37:14 Dan Pashman? And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. The Sporkful is produced by me along with managing producer- Emma Morgenstern. And senior producer- Andres O'Hara. Our engineer is-
37:48 Speaker 04 Jared O'Connell.
37:49 Dan Pashman? Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
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