May 22, 2025 • 31 mins
Seven people knew the recipe for a half-a-billion dollar muffin. Then, one of them tried to leave.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin hold.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Let's take a little bite here. One morning not long ago,
my colleague bend ADF. Haffrey and I huddled in a
small back room at Pushkin Industries to solve a mystery.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
It like hits the back of your palette. There's like
aunt funk to it, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Through the glass wall of the room, we could see
our fellow Pushkin nights 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 letten. Also, not forget its size. Yes, because
(01:01):
it's palm, it's palmable. Breakfast is the meal you make
when you're barely conscious, So the breakfast table is a
super bowl for food companies. Lunch is eating 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.
(01:24):
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. Cherios, lucky charms, pop tarts, rice crispies.
But there's only one breakfast item legendary enough that when
I take a bite, suddenly I remember my childhood. Also,
(01:47):
how my father felt about cutting the cross off bread.
He I think he viewed that as a kind of
a sign of as it a kind of an a feat move,
a side of moral weakness, moral instead of a lack
of real kind of fiber when it came to eating
your food. Or Ben takes a bite and suddenly he's
(02:08):
off for the million time about proost.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
It does have that kind of like Pristian association thing,
Like it tastes like this, I remember this taste. Yes,
when I have this like it does take me back,
like I am seeing my family's kitchen where we would
eat breakfast, and like the big spread.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
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
(02:48):
iconic breakfast bread of all time.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
And for that reason it is nearly a half a
billion dollars a year in sales product. It is the
cinequonn of bread products, baked goods. Yeah, the champ undisputed.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
What sets that thomas Is English muffin apart from all
the others. It says right there on the package Knooks
and Cranny's. 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
(03:28):
the family jewels. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. Today on the show,
Ben and Alf Haffrey 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 you're getting
(03:50):
part one.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Here's Ben. 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,
(04:17):
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 took some crannies. And even recognizing I was paying
by the second, I was like, what did you just say?
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Why have so many of you switched from toast at
Thomas's English muffins? Definitely the cranny.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
It was the nooks. The key to English muffins 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.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Why Thomas's the nooks and Cranny's muffin making breakfast better?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
For over one hundred years. In eighteen seventy four, 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 the recipe in his pocket for
what typically would be called Welsh muffins or crumpets. He
(05:29):
cooked them on a griddle so they'd be crisp on
the outside and dowe yet pockmarked in the inside in
a way few other breads were Thomas's. Nooks and Crannies
took New York by storm, demands 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
(05:53):
will note, if you look at the bakery shelves at
your local grocery store, 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
(06:15):
of them know better than to cross the entity that
now owns Thomas's group. O Bimbo, did you know that
your bread is owned by Mexico.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
CNBC's Michelle Ruzcoberra caught up with the nation's largest bakery,
GROUPO Bimbo.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
GROUPO Bimbo International Baking.
Speaker 5 (06:33):
Conglomerate Entemens owned by a Mexican bread company, Sarah Lee
bought by a Mexican bread company. Group of Bimbo is
just the biggest baker in the United States.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
It is the biggest baker in the entire world.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Bimbo is everywhere. They've taken over half the bread brands
you've heard of in fifty percent of the rest. They've
swept through the US, acquiring one bakery after another.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
It's the first bakery with a big national footprint, and
they plan to be global.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
No one stands in the way of GROUPO Bimbo. And
in two thousand and nine, at the height of their powers,
they acquired the holy Grail of baked goods, the Nooks
and Crannies.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
Thomas's English Muffins, owned by a Mexican bread company.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
The secret recipe for Nooks and Crannies brought in about
half a billion dollars in annual revenue to Group of Bimbo.
But then, according to Bimbo, someone tried to steal it.
Can you just tell me the the basic facts of
the case.
Speaker 5 (07:34):
Well, in this case, I guess we can go through it.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
I'm speaking with Louis del Judice, partner at the major
law firm Troutman Pepperlock, 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
(08:00):
you the lessons of the muffin.
Speaker 5 (08:03):
Do you know with one of the best kept trade secrets?
And everybody thinks coke, And I'm like, well, Thomas is
English muffins, which we've all grown up on. There's only
ten people in the world that know how to make it.
Thomas's English muffin.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
And people go, what, Actually it's fewer than ten. 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.
(08:35):
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 GROUPO Bambo employee named Chris Boticella.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
Executive officer. He's in charge of the entire West Coast,
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 non disclosure agreement,
but that non disclosure agreement's only well he's employed.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
It's twenty ten, the year after Group of Bembo 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 codebooks that
only a few people have access to. Babachella, as a
senior executive, is one of those people. He oversees a
(09:29):
facility in Placentia, California, where the muffins are made. He's
been in the industry since he was sixteen 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.
Speaker 5 (09:50):
He had said that they had done some cost cutting
and some head cutting, so that sort of left the
bad taste in his mouth. It sounded like, from the
one email that's attached to the complaint that maybe had
a little bit of a 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
I may not have always nine to I, but we've
(10:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Chris gets a job offer at Hostis, famed owner of Twinkies,
one of Bambo's only competitors, but just barely. Hostess had
just gone through bankruptcy. Hostess was a possible target for
Bambo acquisition, but then Bimbo would have owned almost every
bake good on the planet, and at that point, where's
the fun. Chris probably knew that group of Bimbo wasn't
(10:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:47):
So now he's sitting all through Q four at his
role with Thomas's getting all the Q four information, all
the look foward information for the next year, all the financials,
on top of all the other knowledge he had.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Chris signs with Hostess in October. His start date is January.
The weeks stick 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 asks about how to enroll
in health coverage.
Speaker 5 (11:19):
Oh, I need cobra, meaning like that's code word for
like I'm going to retire. Almost right, but.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Then Hostess puts out a press release.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
They helped find out about Host's press release that he's
going to work in the next two days.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
For Hostess, and Bembo's like, oh shit.
Speaker 5 (11:36):
We've got this seventy five year old plus secret of
how to bake Thomas's English muffins. It's a half a
billion dollar product and he knows it.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Does Hostess have an English muffin? Not yet? Fuck HR calls.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
Chris, no, no, you weren't retiring. You were going to
the hated competitor.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
This is bad, Hr says, get out.
Speaker 5 (11:54):
Now, he got to a certain point where he knew
too much and now he's iced out.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
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 k Nooks and grannies.
We'll be right back. We're going to return to the
Knoks and grannies, I promise. But first we have to
(12:22):
talk about Willy Wonka.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
So I'll start by saying that one of my favorite
books as a kid was Roald Dahl's Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Genie C. Fromer is a Weis dean at the New
York University Law School. She's also the Walter J. Derenberg
Professor of Intellectual Property Law and the scholar of Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
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
(13:07):
they could steal his us and candy innovations, and he
couldn't tolerate it as a business matter anymore, so he
shut down.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
And so what we learn is that Willy Wonka has
found the magical solution to trade secret theft by having
umpa lumpas 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
(13:57):
the some of the racists and other aspects.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Maybe in a viohilation of some employment law, but it's totally.
Genie's insight about the umpa lumpas became the seed of
not one, but two brilliant articles. She wrote, using Willy
Wonka as the skeleton key for understanding trade secrecy. Her
(14:21):
major revelation, Willi Wanka'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.
Speaker 4 (14:33):
Everything from reading about the Mars company blindfolding any repair
people that would come into fixed 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.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Trade secrecy is the part of the law where life
begins to resemble Willy Wonka.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
This is the most secret machine in my entire factory.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
What's it do?
Speaker 5 (15:04):
Cat you see?
Speaker 3 (15:04):
It makes everlasting gobstoppers?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Did you see? People love secrets from a very early age.
It's why Charlie in 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. But secrets are
(15:29):
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
(15:50):
door saying top secret, keep out. Trade secrecy works on
playground rules.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
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, aguly.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Now imagine I'm a major corporation in the real world.
I'm infinitely more powerful than you. I'm Willie Wonka and
you are an oo ballompa. 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,
(16:30):
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 oo ballompa. It used to be the easiest way
to turn a human being into an oop ballompa was
(16:52):
a non compete clause. But Janie says that's going away.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
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
(17:21):
and workers with lower incomes in ways that are keeping
them in jobs that they might want to leave and
go somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
A lot of states are banning non competes now, which
is one of the reasons a company might come to
Louis del Judy'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 codebook?
Speaker 5 (17:46):
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
is not going to really be in play.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
But trade secrets can have a dangerous power.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
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 over
claimed things of secrets, and that might prevent them from
taking another job.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
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. The authentic
(18:43):
Coca Cola formula is written by the tiny grain of
rice kept in an old liking chest, or cursed on
anyone who opens it. The most famous ones are the recipes,
Coca Cola's secret formula, KFC's eleven 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
(19:06):
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 Banchella. Can you tell me
how you came across the case and how you teach it.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
I know the case through working on trade, seper scholarship,
and teaching. It's a more recent classic.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
I would say, Bimbo Bakeries versus Boutchella. 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 Umpah Lumpa
who took the everlasting gobstopper out of Willy Wonka's factory
(19:54):
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 and I realized the lessons of this
case aren't clear at all. If somehow you missed the
(20:17):
twenty seventeen 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, A super
lawyer's magazine puts it quote. Ainsley has represented whistleblowers in
(20:40):
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 sometime in January twenty ten regarding a
(21:03):
secret recipe for English muffins.
Speaker 6 (21:05):
It was a pretty small budget to begin with, and
I was at a big firm, so there was some
question about whether I could take it or not. But
they let me take it.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
When you say let you take it, were you eager
to take it? Yeah?
Speaker 6 (21:20):
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.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
Out of his desk.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (21:37):
So well, he was a single person and being sued
by a huge.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Corporation, global conglomerate.
Speaker 6 (21:48):
As with the deepest of pockets.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Chris Boticella 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. Group of Bimbo is one of the large
bakeries in the world. Group of Bimbo bows to nobody.
So within days of Chris's termination, before he starts his
(22:16):
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 allegation section of what they filed.
Items one through ten cover the basics of the case,
(22:36):
and then they get to the secret. BBU and its
predecessors have gone to great lengths to keep secret the
recipe and process for making Thomas's English Muffins for over
seventy five years. Thomas's English Muffins are a unique product,
famous for their distinctive nooks and cranny's characteristics. As a
result of his employment Bodicella learned trade secrets relating to
(22:59):
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 thirteen, Vodicella could produce an English muffin that
might look a bit different, but that would nevertheless possess
(23:22):
the distinctive taste, texture, and flavor character that distinguished the
Thomas's English muffins and that have been the foundation of
the product's success. End quote. If you're Chris, this.
Speaker 7 (23:37):
Is bad.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
Because you have to The judge is coming to this.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Cold Louis del Judice partner Troupman Pepper Locke muffin trade
secret enthusiast.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
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 Crandies.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
An immediately recognizable dre secret. Absolutely, you can't let someone
take the secret behind the greatest breakfast product of all time.
The judge grants Biembo'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 right after.
Speaker 5 (24:27):
He got off the phone with HR when they said, hey,
we heard the announcement from Hostess. All sudden, three flash
drives ends up getting plugged into the laptop.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
When confronted with this information, Chris told the court he
was practicing for his new job. The court is like,
are you serious, I.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
Was practicing for my new job. Out of copy, step
on to a flash drive and take it off the
flat drive and put it back on the flash He's got,
you know, your figure. He's in his late fifties, he's
not good with technology. But yeah, So the court found
that a little bit unbelievable that he was practicing.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Chris conceded that it was complicated, but there are mitigating
factors here. First, the rush of it all and the
fact that he just met Liz, his lawyer. Then two
he'd signed a document with Hosts saying that he wouldn't
share any confidential Bimbo information. He said he'd stuck around
because he wanted to get his ear end bonus and
finished two projects he was working on. But the court
(25:21):
was not convinced. There's not a.
Speaker 5 (25:23):
Lot of confusion or new law that was made. It's
just everything's really black and white.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
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.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
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 where cupcakes or.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Anything else sandwich thins. Yeah, exactly, Liz says. Sure, in
those documents there's financial information, costs, save strategies, et cetera.
Confidential stuff, but that's in a different category than the
ancient muffin trade secret. I can actually read it to
you this section.
Speaker 7 (26:19):
Okay, So documents and Exhibits nine through twenty five include
Bimbo's cost reduction strategies, product launch dates, anticipated plant and
line closures, labor contract information, production strength and weaknesses of
many Bimbo bakeries, and the cross structures for individual products
by brand. All this documentation is highly confidential, even within Bimbo,
(26:40):
and would be extremely harmful to Bimbo in the hands
of the competitor.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
You don't think that's sufficient.
Speaker 6 (26:45):
I agree that it was confidential. It's confidential, but it's
not a trade secret.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Bimbo leads with the nooks and crannies and the muffins,
but in all the fine print of their complaint Narian Nook,
Nora Cranny, And yet Liz thinks that's really what this
was all about.
Speaker 6 (27:03):
Anytime 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
(27:27):
people at Bimbo who might be thinking of stealing the
or peddling the English muffin secret. You know that they
were going to pursue them.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
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
(28:00):
case never went to trial. It was meant to go
to trial, but Liz told me there wasn't money for
a trial. 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.
(28:20):
The ruling stood. Now, I'll grant you that Chris was
not an ideal defendant, but this case had real consequences
for his life.
Speaker 5 (28:29):
After the fact that said, you go anywhere near the
baking industry, you have to tell Thomas's that you're going
to be employed there, and which means thomas'es 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
(28:50):
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 ten foot pole.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Bimbo didn't respond to a request for comment by the
time we recorded this episode. I tried for months to
reach Chris s Poticella. 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
(29:23):
will never understand the impact that this had on my
personal and professional life. 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
(29:45):
to Louis and Jeanie about the future of trade secrecy,
I saw a world of trade secrets opening up before me,
at once futuristic and medieval, where every company had mystical
codebooks full of secret recipes, a knook and cranny for
every employee. Nooks and Cranny's is a shorthand for trade secret,
(30:09):
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. We are trying to free
the muffin, So we're we're reverse engineering the muffin recipe. WHOA,
(30:33):
I kind of love this, Okay, okay, don't tell people
that next week we attempt to crack the code of
the English muffin. My question for you is, is this
like you're trying to create their exact products?
Speaker 5 (30:48):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Can we make this exact English muffin? Revision's History is
produced by Me then that of Haffrey, with Lucy Sullivan
and Nina Bird Lawrence. This episode was edited by Julia Barton.
Special thanks to Jake Flanagan, Jordan Mannequin, Greta Cone, and
Sarah Nix. Back checking on this episode by Kate Ferby,
(31:12):
Original scoring by Louis Scara, mixing and mastering by Ecco Mountain.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Ben matt A Faffrey.
Pushkin hold.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Let's take a little bite here. One morning not long ago,
my colleague bend ADF. Haffrey and I huddled in a
small back room at Pushkin Industries to solve a mystery.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
It like hits the back of your palette. There's like
aunt funk to it, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Through the glass wall of the room, we could see
our fellow Pushkin nights 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 letten. Also, not forget its size. Yes, because
(01:01):
it's palm, it's palmable. Breakfast is the meal you make
when you're barely conscious, So the breakfast table is a
super bowl for food companies. Lunch is eating 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.
(01:24):
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. Cherios, lucky charms, pop tarts, rice crispies.
But there's only one breakfast item legendary enough that when
I take a bite, suddenly I remember my childhood. Also,
(01:47):
how my father felt about cutting the cross off bread.
He I think he viewed that as a kind of
a sign of as it a kind of an a feat move,
a side of moral weakness, moral instead of a lack
of real kind of fiber when it came to eating
your food. Or Ben takes a bite and suddenly he's
(02:08):
off for the million time about proost.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
It does have that kind of like Pristian association thing,
Like it tastes like this, I remember this taste. Yes,
when I have this like it does take me back,
like I am seeing my family's kitchen where we would
eat breakfast, and like the big spread.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
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
(02:48):
iconic breakfast bread of all time.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
And for that reason it is nearly a half a
billion dollars a year in sales product. It is the
cinequonn of bread products, baked goods. Yeah, the champ undisputed.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
What sets that thomas Is English muffin apart from all
the others. It says right there on the package Knooks
and Cranny's. 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
(03:28):
the family jewels. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. Today on the show,
Ben and Alf Haffrey 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 you're getting
(03:50):
part one.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Here's Ben. 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,
(04:17):
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 took some crannies. And even recognizing I was paying
by the second, I was like, what did you just say?
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Why have so many of you switched from toast at
Thomas's English muffins? Definitely the cranny.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
It was the nooks. The key to English muffins 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.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Why Thomas's the nooks and Cranny's muffin making breakfast better?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
For over one hundred years. In eighteen seventy four, 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 the recipe in his pocket for
what typically would be called Welsh muffins or crumpets. He
(05:29):
cooked them on a griddle so they'd be crisp on
the outside and dowe yet pockmarked in the inside in
a way few other breads were Thomas's. Nooks and Crannies
took New York by storm, demands 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
(05:53):
will note, if you look at the bakery shelves at
your local grocery store, 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
(06:15):
of them know better than to cross the entity that
now owns Thomas's group. O Bimbo, did you know that
your bread is owned by Mexico.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
CNBC's Michelle Ruzcoberra caught up with the nation's largest bakery,
GROUPO Bimbo.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
GROUPO Bimbo International Baking.
Speaker 5 (06:33):
Conglomerate Entemens owned by a Mexican bread company, Sarah Lee
bought by a Mexican bread company. Group of Bimbo is
just the biggest baker in the United States.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
It is the biggest baker in the entire world.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Bimbo is everywhere. They've taken over half the bread brands
you've heard of in fifty percent of the rest. They've
swept through the US, acquiring one bakery after another.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
It's the first bakery with a big national footprint, and
they plan to be global.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
No one stands in the way of GROUPO Bimbo. And
in two thousand and nine, at the height of their powers,
they acquired the holy Grail of baked goods, the Nooks
and Crannies.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
Thomas's English Muffins, owned by a Mexican bread company.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
The secret recipe for Nooks and Crannies brought in about
half a billion dollars in annual revenue to Group of Bimbo.
But then, according to Bimbo, someone tried to steal it.
Can you just tell me the the basic facts of
the case.
Speaker 5 (07:34):
Well, in this case, I guess we can go through it.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
I'm speaking with Louis del Judice, partner at the major
law firm Troutman Pepperlock, 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
(08:00):
you the lessons of the muffin.
Speaker 5 (08:03):
Do you know with one of the best kept trade secrets?
And everybody thinks coke, And I'm like, well, Thomas is
English muffins, which we've all grown up on. There's only
ten people in the world that know how to make it.
Thomas's English muffin.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
And people go, what, Actually it's fewer than ten. 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.
(08:35):
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 GROUPO Bambo employee named Chris Boticella.
Speaker 5 (08:47):
Executive officer. He's in charge of the entire West Coast,
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 non disclosure agreement,
but that non disclosure agreement's only well he's employed.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
It's twenty ten, the year after Group of Bembo 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 codebooks that
only a few people have access to. Babachella, as a
senior executive, is one of those people. He oversees a
(09:29):
facility in Placentia, California, where the muffins are made. He's
been in the industry since he was sixteen 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.
Speaker 5 (09:50):
He had said that they had done some cost cutting
and some head cutting, so that sort of left the
bad taste in his mouth. It sounded like, from the
one email that's attached to the complaint that maybe had
a little bit of a 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
I may not have always nine to I, but we've
(10:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Chris gets a job offer at Hostis, famed owner of Twinkies,
one of Bambo's only competitors, but just barely. Hostess had
just gone through bankruptcy. Hostess was a possible target for
Bambo acquisition, but then Bimbo would have owned almost every
bake good on the planet, and at that point, where's
the fun. Chris probably knew that group of Bimbo wasn't
(10:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:47):
So now he's sitting all through Q four at his
role with Thomas's getting all the Q four information, all
the look foward information for the next year, all the financials,
on top of all the other knowledge he had.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Chris signs with Hostess in October. His start date is January.
The weeks stick 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 asks about how to enroll
in health coverage.
Speaker 5 (11:19):
Oh, I need cobra, meaning like that's code word for
like I'm going to retire. Almost right, but.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Then Hostess puts out a press release.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
They helped find out about Host's press release that he's
going to work in the next two days.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
For Hostess, and Bembo's like, oh shit.
Speaker 5 (11:36):
We've got this seventy five year old plus secret of
how to bake Thomas's English muffins. It's a half a
billion dollar product and he knows it.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Does Hostess have an English muffin? Not yet? Fuck HR calls.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
Chris, no, no, you weren't retiring. You were going to
the hated competitor.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
This is bad, Hr says, get out.
Speaker 5 (11:54):
Now, he got to a certain point where he knew
too much and now he's iced out.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
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 k Nooks and grannies.
We'll be right back. We're going to return to the
Knoks and grannies, I promise. But first we have to
(12:22):
talk about Willy Wonka.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
So I'll start by saying that one of my favorite
books as a kid was Roald Dahl's Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Genie C. Fromer is a Weis dean at the New
York University Law School. She's also the Walter J. Derenberg
Professor of Intellectual Property Law and the scholar of Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
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
(13:07):
they could steal his us and candy innovations, and he
couldn't tolerate it as a business matter anymore, so he
shut down.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
And so what we learn is that Willy Wonka has
found the magical solution to trade secret theft by having
umpa lumpas 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
(13:57):
the some of the racists and other aspects.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Maybe in a viohilation of some employment law, but it's totally.
Genie's insight about the umpa lumpas became the seed of
not one, but two brilliant articles. She wrote, using Willy
Wonka as the skeleton key for understanding trade secrecy. Her
(14:21):
major revelation, Willi Wanka'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.
Speaker 4 (14:33):
Everything from reading about the Mars company blindfolding any repair
people that would come into fixed 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.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Trade secrecy is the part of the law where life
begins to resemble Willy Wonka.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
This is the most secret machine in my entire factory.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
What's it do?
Speaker 5 (15:04):
Cat you see?
Speaker 3 (15:04):
It makes everlasting gobstoppers?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Did you see? People love secrets from a very early age.
It's why Charlie in 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. But secrets are
(15:29):
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
(15:50):
door saying top secret, keep out. Trade secrecy works on
playground rules.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
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, aguly.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Now imagine I'm a major corporation in the real world.
I'm infinitely more powerful than you. I'm Willie Wonka and
you are an oo ballompa. 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,
(16:30):
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 oo ballompa. It used to be the easiest way
to turn a human being into an oop ballompa was
(16:52):
a non compete clause. But Janie says that's going away.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
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
(17:21):
and workers with lower incomes in ways that are keeping
them in jobs that they might want to leave and
go somewhere else.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
A lot of states are banning non competes now, which
is one of the reasons a company might come to
Louis del Judy'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 codebook?
Speaker 5 (17:46):
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
is not going to really be in play.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
But trade secrets can have a dangerous power.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
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 over
claimed things of secrets, and that might prevent them from
taking another job.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
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. The authentic
(18:43):
Coca Cola formula is written by the tiny grain of
rice kept in an old liking chest, or cursed on
anyone who opens it. The most famous ones are the recipes,
Coca Cola's secret formula, KFC's eleven 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
(19:06):
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 Banchella. Can you tell me
how you came across the case and how you teach it.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
I know the case through working on trade, seper scholarship,
and teaching. It's a more recent classic.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
I would say, Bimbo Bakeries versus Boutchella. 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 Umpah Lumpa
who took the everlasting gobstopper out of Willy Wonka's factory
(19:54):
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 and I realized the lessons of this
case aren't clear at all. If somehow you missed the
(20:17):
twenty seventeen 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, A super
lawyer's magazine puts it quote. Ainsley has represented whistleblowers in
(20:40):
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 sometime in January twenty ten regarding a
(21:03):
secret recipe for English muffins.
Speaker 6 (21:05):
It was a pretty small budget to begin with, and
I was at a big firm, so there was some
question about whether I could take it or not. But
they let me take it.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
When you say let you take it, were you eager
to take it? Yeah?
Speaker 6 (21:20):
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.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
Out of his desk.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (21:37):
So well, he was a single person and being sued
by a huge.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Corporation, global conglomerate.
Speaker 6 (21:48):
As with the deepest of pockets.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Chris Boticella 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. Group of Bimbo is one of the large
bakeries in the world. Group of Bimbo bows to nobody.
So within days of Chris's termination, before he starts his
(22:16):
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 allegation section of what they filed.
Items one through ten cover the basics of the case,
(22:36):
and then they get to the secret. BBU and its
predecessors have gone to great lengths to keep secret the
recipe and process for making Thomas's English Muffins for over
seventy five years. Thomas's English Muffins are a unique product,
famous for their distinctive nooks and cranny's characteristics. As a
result of his employment Bodicella learned trade secrets relating to
(22:59):
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 thirteen, Vodicella could produce an English muffin that
might look a bit different, but that would nevertheless possess
(23:22):
the distinctive taste, texture, and flavor character that distinguished the
Thomas's English muffins and that have been the foundation of
the product's success. End quote. If you're Chris, this.
Speaker 7 (23:37):
Is bad.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
Because you have to The judge is coming to this.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Cold Louis del Judice partner Troupman Pepper Locke muffin trade
secret enthusiast.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
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 Crandies.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
An immediately recognizable dre secret. Absolutely, you can't let someone
take the secret behind the greatest breakfast product of all time.
The judge grants Biembo'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 right after.
Speaker 5 (24:27):
He got off the phone with HR when they said, hey,
we heard the announcement from Hostess. All sudden, three flash
drives ends up getting plugged into the laptop.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
When confronted with this information, Chris told the court he
was practicing for his new job. The court is like,
are you serious, I.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
Was practicing for my new job. Out of copy, step
on to a flash drive and take it off the
flat drive and put it back on the flash He's got,
you know, your figure. He's in his late fifties, he's
not good with technology. But yeah, So the court found
that a little bit unbelievable that he was practicing.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Chris conceded that it was complicated, but there are mitigating
factors here. First, the rush of it all and the
fact that he just met Liz, his lawyer. Then two
he'd signed a document with Hosts saying that he wouldn't
share any confidential Bimbo information. He said he'd stuck around
because he wanted to get his ear end bonus and
finished two projects he was working on. But the court
(25:21):
was not convinced. There's not a.
Speaker 5 (25:23):
Lot of confusion or new law that was made. It's
just everything's really black and white.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
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.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
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 where cupcakes or.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Anything else sandwich thins. Yeah, exactly, Liz says. Sure, in
those documents there's financial information, costs, save strategies, et cetera.
Confidential stuff, but that's in a different category than the
ancient muffin trade secret. I can actually read it to
you this section.
Speaker 7 (26:19):
Okay, So documents and Exhibits nine through twenty five include
Bimbo's cost reduction strategies, product launch dates, anticipated plant and
line closures, labor contract information, production strength and weaknesses of
many Bimbo bakeries, and the cross structures for individual products
by brand. All this documentation is highly confidential, even within Bimbo,
(26:40):
and would be extremely harmful to Bimbo in the hands
of the competitor.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
You don't think that's sufficient.
Speaker 6 (26:45):
I agree that it was confidential. It's confidential, but it's
not a trade secret.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Bimbo leads with the nooks and crannies and the muffins,
but in all the fine print of their complaint Narian Nook,
Nora Cranny, And yet Liz thinks that's really what this
was all about.
Speaker 6 (27:03):
Anytime 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
(27:27):
people at Bimbo who might be thinking of stealing the
or peddling the English muffin secret. You know that they
were going to pursue them.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
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
(28:00):
case never went to trial. It was meant to go
to trial, but Liz told me there wasn't money for
a trial. 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.
(28:20):
The ruling stood. Now, I'll grant you that Chris was
not an ideal defendant, but this case had real consequences
for his life.
Speaker 5 (28:29):
After the fact that said, you go anywhere near the
baking industry, you have to tell Thomas's that you're going
to be employed there, and which means thomas'es 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
(28:50):
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 ten foot pole.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Bimbo didn't respond to a request for comment by the
time we recorded this episode. I tried for months to
reach Chris s Poticella. 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
(29:23):
will never understand the impact that this had on my
personal and professional life. 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
(29:45):
to Louis and Jeanie about the future of trade secrecy,
I saw a world of trade secrets opening up before me,
at once futuristic and medieval, where every company had mystical
codebooks full of secret recipes, a knook and cranny for
every employee. Nooks and Cranny's is a shorthand for trade secret,
(30:09):
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. We are trying to free
the muffin, So we're we're reverse engineering the muffin recipe. WHOA,
(30:33):
I kind of love this, Okay, okay, don't tell people
that next week we attempt to crack the code of
the English muffin. My question for you is, is this
like you're trying to create their exact products?
Speaker 5 (30:48):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Can we make this exact English muffin? Revision's History is
produced by Me then that of Haffrey, with Lucy Sullivan
and Nina Bird Lawrence. This episode was edited by Julia Barton.
Special thanks to Jake Flanagan, Jordan Mannequin, Greta Cone, and
Sarah Nix. Back checking on this episode by Kate Ferby,
(31:12):
Original scoring by Louis Scara, mixing and mastering by Ecco Mountain.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Ben matt A Faffrey.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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