Nooks & Crannies

Speaker 1 Pushkin.

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Speaker 23 On my last trip to London, I had dinner at my favorite spot in Clerkenwell.

Speaker 8 It's been in continuous operation for something like 150 years, which means it predates automobiles, radios, and the zipper.

Speaker 12 I had the mangalitza loin chop and the potatoes confi.

Speaker 32 Yum.

Speaker 27 You need to go there.

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Speaker 23 and then an H.

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Speaker 15 Hold on, let's take a little bite here.

Speaker 22 One morning, not long ago, my colleague Ben Nadaf Hafrey and I huddled in a small back room at Pushkin Industries to solve a mystery.

Speaker 35 It like hits the back of your palate.

Speaker 36 There's like a funk to it.

Speaker 37 You know what I mean?

Speaker 28 Through the glass wall of the room, we could see our fellow Pushkinites working on various prosaic podcasts and audiobooks.

Speaker 33 While we alone wrestled with an eternal question involving

Speaker 22 toasted bread.

Speaker 15 Just from a sensory perspective, there's a lot of of crunch.

Speaker 21 Let's also not forget its size.

Speaker 39 Yes. Because

Speaker 33 it's palmable.

Speaker 8 Breakfast is the meal you make when you're barely conscious.

Speaker 25 So the breakfast table is a Super Bowl for food companies.

Speaker 8 Lunch is eaten out. Dinner, if you're lucky, is prepared from scratch.

Speaker 31 But think about breakfast.

Speaker 20 All the day lies before you and you are in need of sustenance.

Speaker 41 You want something wholesome, but crucially easy.

Speaker 1 A little ready-made.

Speaker 26 Breakfast foods become lifelong habits.

Speaker 8 Brands fight tooth and nail for a prime spot at that table.

Speaker 30 Many have fought valiantly.

Speaker 42 Cheerios, lucky charms, pop-tarts, rice krispies.

Speaker 33 But there's only one breakfast item, legendary enough that when I take a bite, suddenly I remember my childhood.

Speaker 19 Also, how my father felt about cutting the cross-soft bread.

Speaker 27 I think he viewed that as a kind of a sign of as a kind of an effet move,

Speaker 27 a sign of moral weakness, moral and sort of

Speaker 31 a lack of real kind of fiber when it came to eating your food.

Speaker 30 Or Ben takes a bite and suddenly he's off for the millionth time about Proust.

Speaker 45 It does have that kind of like Proustian association thing.

Speaker 39 Like it tastes like,

Speaker 35 I remember this taste.

Speaker 45 Yes. When I have this,

Speaker 45 it does take me back.

Speaker 35 Like I am seeing my family's kitchen where we would eat breakfast and like the big spread.

Speaker 7 Our breakfast mystery comes in packages of six, but they cannot be eaten right out of the box.

Speaker 27 Each item inside must be split in two, then toasted, then buttered for the magic to work.

Speaker 22 And oh, the magic works.

Speaker 26 I'm talking, of course, about Thomas's English Muffins, the most iconic breakfast bread of all time.

Speaker 51 And for that reason, it is nearly a half a billion dollar a year in sales

Speaker 39 product.

Speaker 40 It is the sine qua non of bread products, baked goods.

Speaker 39 Yeah, the champ, undisputed.

Speaker 30 What sets the Thomas's English muffin apart from all the others?

Speaker 19 It says right there on the package: nooks and crannies.

Speaker 8 The recipe for Thomas's English muffin has been one of the most closely held trade secrets there is

Speaker 26 until, allegedly, one baking executive tried to make off with the family's jewels.

Speaker 1 I'm Malcolm Glaubo.

Speaker 8 You're listening to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Speaker 33 Today on the show, Ben Nadaf Haffrey peers into the nooks and crannies of one of the greatest legal cases you've never heard of.

Speaker 20 It's a big story, this muffin case.

Speaker 13 Today, you're getting part one.

Speaker 26 Here's Ben.

Speaker 54 I once once hired a lawyer who dreams about suing people.

Speaker 50 He told me this on a call once.

Speaker 57 I asked for proof, and he showed me a video of himself asleep, very clearly muttering, I'll sue you.

Speaker 54 And something to the effect of, you're going to jail.

Speaker 61 There were some swears in there too.

Speaker 55 My first thought was, this man is the best lawyer I'll ever have.

Speaker 40 Second thought, I better pay him quickly. We were going over an employment contract.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 35 To which my lawyer replied, well, it's nooks and crannies.

Speaker 62 And even recognizing I was paying by the second, I was like, what did you just say?

Speaker 65 Why have so many of you switched from toast to Thomas's English muffins?

Speaker 57 Definitely the cranny.

Speaker 65 It was the nooks.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 66 But somehow nooks and crannies are now lawyer shorthand for trade secret.

Speaker 33 Why?

Speaker 65 Thomas's the nooks and crannies muffin making breakfast better for over 100 years.

Speaker 57 In 1874 a baker named Samuel Bath Thomas left England for the United States.

Speaker 50 Little is 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 Welsh muffins or crumpets.

Speaker 53 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.

Speaker 48 Thomas's Nooks and Crannies took New York by storm.

Speaker 62 Demand skyrocketed. He opened another bakery.

Speaker 53 Then it became a corporation.

Speaker 58 Eventually, the words nooks and crannies became a registered trademark of Thomas's English muffins.

Speaker 60 You 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.

Speaker 64 Dave's Killer Bread boasts of butter-catching flavor craters.

Speaker 70 Trader Joe's has pockets and crevices.

Speaker 62 Bays has raised the white flag and left the field entirely with a claim about packaging, now resealable.

Speaker 63 Because all of them know better than to cross the entity that now owns Thomas's.

Speaker 33 Grupo Bimbo.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 54 Grupo Bimbo, International Baking Conglomerate.

Speaker 71 Entamin's, owned by a Mexican bread company. Sarali, bought by a Mexican bread company.
Grupo Bimbo isn't just the biggest baker in the United States. It is the biggest baker in the entire world.
Wow.

Speaker 60 Bimbo is everywhere.

Speaker 63 They've taken over half the bread brands you've heard of and 50% of the rest.

Speaker 62 They've swept through the U.S., acquiring one bakery after another.

Speaker 71 It's the first bakery with a big national footprint, and they plan to be global.

Speaker 63 No one stands in the way of Grupo Bimbo.

Speaker 62 And in 2009, at the height of their powers, they acquired the holy grail of baked goods, the Nooks and Crannies.

Speaker 71 Thomas's English Muffins, owned by a Mexican bread company.

Speaker 54 The secret recipe for Nooks and Crannies brought in about half a billion dollars in annual revenue to Grupo Bimbo.

Speaker 72 But then, according to Bimbo, someone tried to steal it.

Speaker 73 Can you just tell me the

Speaker 56 basic facts of the case?

Speaker 74 Well, in this case, I guess we can go through it.

Speaker 63 I'm speaking with Louis Del Judiz, partner at the major law firm Troutman Pepperlock, in a conference room high above Manhattan.

Speaker 50 This is where my lawyer sent me when I asked about Cranny Law.

Speaker 46 Louis is an expert in intellectual property.

Speaker 62 He says a lot of people come to him to determine if they have their own trade secrets.

Speaker 57 And he tells them, sit down, my friends, and let me teach you the lessons of the muffin.

Speaker 74 Do you know what one of the best kept trade secrets is? And everybody thinks Coke.

Speaker 74 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?

Speaker 39 Actually, it's fewer than 10, but we'll get to that.

Speaker 63 Trade secrets are one of the pillars of IP protection in the United States, along with patents, trademarks, and copyright.

Speaker 48 But unlike the others, a trade secret never expires.

Speaker 35 And the Muffin case is one of the best examples of a trade secret's power and how to protect it.

Speaker 45 Louis was not involved in the case directly, but he studied it at length.

Speaker 46 In any telling, he begins by introducing the defendant, a former Grupo Beambo employee named Chris Botticella.

Speaker 74 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.

Speaker 74 He has to sign a non-disclosure agreement, but that non-disclosure agreement is only while he's employed.

Speaker 77 It's 2010, the year after Grupo Bimbo acquired Thomas's.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 79 It's kept in secret code books that only a few people have access to.

Speaker 62 Botticella, as a senior executive, is one of those people.

Speaker 72 He oversees a facility in Placentia, California, where the muffins are made.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 57 Beambo Bakery's executive of almost a decade. But lately, Chris has been unhappy.

Speaker 74 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.

Speaker 74 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.

Speaker 74 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.

Speaker 74 So when you read that, you know, that's a polite way of saying, you and I used to fight a lot.

Speaker 60 Chris gets a job offer.

Speaker 62 at hostess famed owner of twinkies one of beambo's only competitors but just barely. Hostess had just gone through bankruptcy.

Speaker 62 Hostess was a possible target for Beambo acquisition, but then Beambo would have owned almost every baked good on the planet, and at that point, where's the fun?

Speaker 35 Chris probably knew that Grupo Beambo 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.

Speaker 74 So now he's sitting all through Q4.

Speaker 74 at his role with Thomas's, getting all the Q4 information, all the look-forward information for the next year, all the the financials, on top of all the other knowledge he had.

Speaker 73 Chris signs with Hostess in October.

Speaker 62 His start date is January.

Speaker 59 The weeks tick by.

Speaker 63 Chris finally announces he's leaving Beambo, but he doesn't say he's going to a new job.

Speaker 60 Given his long tenure, his colleagues probably assume he's retiring.

Speaker 53 According to court documents, he asked about how to enroll in health coverage.

Speaker 74 Oh, I need Cobra, meaning like that's code word for like I'm going to retire almost, right?

Speaker 74 But then Hostess puts out a press release they help find out from a hostess press release that he's gonna work in the next two days for hostess and bimbo's like oh

Speaker 74 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 does hostess have an english muffin not yet

Speaker 74 hr calls chris no no you weren't retiring you were going to the hated competitor this is bad hr says get out now he got to a certain point point where he knew too much, and now he's iced out.

Speaker 56 Chris is walked out of the building.

Speaker 63 He has no idea what's coming for him.

Speaker 56 Least of all, that he's about to be swallowed up

Speaker 64 by the nooks and crannies.

Speaker 39 We'll be right back.

Speaker 6 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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Speaker 28 Picture this. You're in the garage, hands covered in grease, just finished tuning up your engine with a part you found on eBay, and you realize, you know what? I could also use some new brakes.

Speaker 28 So where do you go next?

Speaker 33 Back to eBay.

Speaker 28 You can find anything there. It's unreal.
Wipers, headlights, even cold air intakes. It's all there.
And you've got eBay guaranteed fit. You order a part, and if it doesn't fit, send it back.

Speaker 28 Simple as that. Look, DIY fixes can be major.
It doesn't matter if it's just maintenance or a major mod. You got it, especially when things are guaranteed to fit.

Speaker 28 So when you dive into your next car project, start with eBay. All the parts you need at prices you'll love, guaranteed to fit every time.

Speaker 19 eBay, things

Speaker 1 people

Speaker 33 love.

Speaker 54 We're going to return to the nooks and crannies, I promise.

Speaker 33 But first, we have to talk about Willy Wonka.

Speaker 83 So I'll start by saying that one of my favorite books as a kid was Roll Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Speaker 62 Jeannie C.

Speaker 54 Fromer is a vice dean at the New York University Law School.

Speaker 55 She's also the Walter J.

Speaker 57 Durenberg Professor of Intellectual Property Law and the scholar of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Speaker 83 When my kids were younger, I was was rereading the book to them.

Speaker 83 And

Speaker 83 I was struck now that I was working in intellectual property by how much of the story was actually driven by trade secrets.

Speaker 83 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.

Speaker 83 And he couldn't tolerate it as a business matter anymore. So he shut down.

Speaker 35 For those in need of a refresher, in the book, Wonka's factory has started back up, but nobody understands how.

Speaker 68 Nobody ever goes in.

Speaker 54 Nobody ever comes out.

Speaker 56 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 83 And so what we learn is that Willy Wonka has found the magical solution to trade secret theft

Speaker 83 by having oompa loompas work in the factory. Why are they the magical solution? Because

Speaker 83 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.

Speaker 83 Let's not talk about some of the racist and other aspects.

Speaker 47 He may be in violation of some employment law, but it's.

Speaker 84 Totally.

Speaker 55 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.

Speaker 61 Her major revelation, Willy Wonka's paranoia, the spying and extreme secrecy, was totally justified.

Speaker 57 It was essentially based on a true story.

Speaker 62 This is just part of being in the candy industry.

Speaker 83 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.

Speaker 83 So it felt actually very true to life and that was a little bit shocking to me.

Speaker 57 Trade secrecy is the part of the law where life begins to resemble Willy Wonka.

Speaker 63 This is the most secret machine in my entire factory.

Speaker 39 But what's it do?

Speaker 54 Can't you see it makes everlasting gobstoppers?

Speaker 39 Did you say everlasting?

Speaker 51 People love secrets from a very early age.

Speaker 63 It's why Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a classic children's story. It's not just the candy, it's the secrets.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 45 But secrets are also dangerous.

Speaker 75 If I tell you a secret, it means I trust you.

Speaker 61 It binds us together.

Speaker 57 But it also alters the balance of power between us.

Speaker 33 You know something I don't want other people to know.

Speaker 56 That puts me at risk.

Speaker 61 So I need you to know it's a secret.

Speaker 36 I tell you, don't tell anyone.

Speaker 80 Before I whisper in your ear, I put up a sign on my bedroom door saying, top secret, keep out.

Speaker 53 Trade secrecy works on playground rules.

Speaker 85 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.

Speaker 39 Agreed?

Speaker 33 Agreed!

Speaker 51 Now imagine I'm a major corporation in the real world.

Speaker 63 I'm infinitely more powerful than you.

Speaker 37 I'm Willy Wonka, and you are an Oompa Loompa.

Speaker 66 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.

Speaker 56 This is the crux of it. At their best, trade secrets protect valuable intellectual property from being stolen.

Speaker 80 But at their worst, they're a powerful tool for a company that wants to turn an employee into an oompa loompa.

Speaker 37 It used to be the easiest way to turn a human being into an oompa loompa was a non-compete clause.

Speaker 75 But Janie says that's going away.

Speaker 83 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-competes as being for the

Speaker 83 small number of employees, the highest level employees, the ones with the access to the most sensitive information.

Speaker 83 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.

Speaker 57 A lot of states are banning non-competes now, which is one of the reasons a company might come to Louis Del Judice, IP expert, to help identify and protect their secrets.

Speaker 59 Could you make that bit in a secret room?

Speaker 54 Can you have a black vault in the office?

Speaker 59 Could there be a secret code book?

Speaker 74 Because a trade secret will be the only way

Speaker 74 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.

Speaker 47 But trade secrets can have a dangerous power.

Speaker 83 Sometimes people are just good at what they do.

Speaker 83 And they have advantages to continue working in the same industry because they know that industry.

Speaker 83 And their business has overclaimed things as secrets, and that might prevent them from taking another job.

Speaker 67 Trade secrets are the only intellectual property protection that can last forever.

Speaker 59 And because of that permanence and the way we're geared to think about secrets already, they have a kind of mystical aura.

Speaker 57 In our secular, disenchanted world, they are the closest thing we have to magic.

Speaker 1 The authentic Coca-Cola formula is written on a tiny tiny grain of rice, kept in an old inken chest. A curse on anyone who opens it.

Speaker 62 The most famous ones are the recipes.

Speaker 67 Coca-Cola's secret formula.

Speaker 63 KFC's 11 spices.

Speaker 48 The exact way to create Wrigley's gum.

Speaker 51 But actually, a whole lot of things can be trade secrets. Software code, financial information.

Speaker 63 You may know a trade secret and not even totally realize it.

Speaker 47 But a good way to recognize one is the Nooks and Crannies test.

Speaker 73 This feels like a good transition to me to Bimbo Bakeries vs.

Speaker 45 Botticella.

Speaker 47 Can you tell me

Speaker 61 how you came across the case and how you teach it?

Speaker 83 I know the case through

Speaker 83 working on trade secret scholarship and teaching.

Speaker 83 It's a more recent classic, I would say.

Speaker 75 Bimbo Bakeries vs.

Speaker 60 Botticella.

Speaker 59 It seemed like every lawyer I talked to knew about the case.

Speaker 57 It wasn't a precedent so much as a legend.

Speaker 63 a piece of lore.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 69 Like any good fairy tale, it's a good teaching tool because the morals clear.

Speaker 64 Except, then I realized, the lessons of this case aren't clear at all.

Speaker 6 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

Speaker 10 T-Mobile knows all about that.

Speaker 9 They're now the best network, according to the experts at an OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

Speaker 15 With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

Speaker 4 With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

Speaker 5 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 7 And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

Speaker 10 That's your business, supercharged.

Speaker 16 Learn more at supermobile.com.

Speaker 3 Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

Speaker 5 where you can see the sky.

Speaker 7 Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Speaker 20 American Military University, where service members like you can access high-quality, affordable education built for your lifestyle.

Speaker 49 With online programs that fit around deployments, training, and unpredictable schedules, AMU makes it possible to earn your degree no matter where duty takes you.

Speaker 25 Their preferred military rate keeps tuition at just $250 per credit hour for undergraduate and master's tuition.

Speaker 20 And with 24-7 mental health support plus career coaching and other services, AMU is committed to your success during and after your service.

Speaker 29 Learn more at amu.apus.edu/slash military to learn more. That's amu.apus.edu slash military.

Speaker 28 Picture this. You're in the garage, hands covered in grease, just finished tuning up your engine with a part you found on eBay, and you realize, you know what? I could also use some new brakes.

Speaker 28 So, where do you go next?

Speaker 33 Back to eBay.

Speaker 28 You can find anything there. It's unreal.
Wipers, headlights, even cold air intakes, it's all there. And you've got eBay guaranteed fit.
You order a part, and if it doesn't fit, send it back.

Speaker 28 Simple as that. Look, DIY fixes can be major.
It doesn't matter if it's just maintenance or a major mod. You got it, especially when things are guaranteed to fit.

Speaker 28 So when you dive into your next car project, start with eBay. All the parts you need at prices you'll love, guaranteed to fit every time.
eBay, things

Speaker 28 people

Speaker 40 love.

Speaker 57 If somehow you missed the 2017 edition of the Pennsylvania Super Lawyers Magazine, I would encourage you to look it up.

Speaker 62 Specifically an article titled, I Can Do That, about a Pennsylvania super lawyer named Elizabeth Ainslie.

Speaker 86 Liz Ainslie is fearless.

Speaker 69 She was head of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania's fraud team.

Speaker 54 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.

Speaker 33 End quote. Legend.

Speaker 54 And yet in that whole article, they don't mention a call she got sometime in January 2010 regarding a secret recipe for English muffins.

Speaker 88 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 let me take it.

Speaker 44 When you say let you take it, were you eager to take it?

Speaker 88 Yeah, it was an interesting case. It was kind of a David and Goliath situation.
I thought

Speaker 88 people ought to be free to move from one employer to another.

Speaker 84 And

Speaker 33 Chris seemed to be out of his death. How so?

Speaker 88 Well, that he was a single person

Speaker 88 and being sued by a huge corporation.

Speaker 33 Global conglomerate.

Speaker 88 Mostly with the deepest of pockets.

Speaker 35 Chris Botticella, as I have mentioned, was in trouble.

Speaker 62 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.

Speaker 51 Grupo Bimbo is one of the largest bakeries in the world.

Speaker 86 Grupo Bimbo bows to nobody.

Speaker 62 So within days of Chris's termination, before he starts his new job at hostess, attorneys for Bimbo file an injunction in the 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.

Speaker 54 I would like to read to you from the factual allegations section of what they filed.

Speaker 63 Items 1 through 10 cover the basics of the case.

Speaker 47 And then they get to the secret.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 Thomas's English Muffins are a unique product famous for their distinctive nooks and crannies characteristics.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 79 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 taste, texture, and flavor character that distinguish the Thomas's English muffins, and that have been the foundation of the product's success.

Speaker 40 End quote.

Speaker 48 If you're Chris,

Speaker 86 this

Speaker 61 is bad.

Speaker 74 Because you have to remember, the judge is coming to this cold.

Speaker 53 Louis Del Judiz, partner, Troutman Pepper Locke, muffin trade secret enthusiast.

Speaker 74 He knows nothing about what's going on.

Speaker 74 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?

Speaker 74 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.

Speaker 57 An immediately recognizable trade secret.

Speaker 73 Absolutely, you can't let someone take the secret behind the greatest breakfast product of all time.

Speaker 53 The judge grants Bimbo's wish.

Speaker 55 Chris can't join Hostess till the case is heard.

Speaker 37 Meanwhile, Grupo Bimbo has hired a computer forensics expert who starts looking through Chris's laptop.

Speaker 74 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.

Speaker 63 When confronted with this information, Chris told the court he was practicing for his new job.

Speaker 53 The court is like, are you serious?

Speaker 74 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 drive.
He's got, you know, you figure he's in his late 50s.

Speaker 76 He's not good with technology.

Speaker 74 But yeah, so the court found that a little bit unbelievable that he was practicing.

Speaker 63 Chris conceded that it was complicated. But there are mitigating factors here.

Speaker 36 First, the rush of it all, and the fact that he'd just met Liz, his lawyer.

Speaker 63 Then, two, he'd signed a document with hostess saying that he wouldn't share any confidential beambo information.

Speaker 63 He said he'd stuck around because he wanted to get his year-end bonus and finished finished two projects he was working on.

Speaker 64 But the court was not convinced.

Speaker 74 There's not a lot of

Speaker 74 confusion or new law that was made. It's just everything's really black and white.

Speaker 56 This is the classic version of the case, black and white.

Speaker 63 Bimbo catches Muffin Thief, accuses executive of stealing all sorts of trade secrets.

Speaker 86 Except his lawyer Liz says, if you look at those documents, there's no evidence of that.

Speaker 88 I saw all of that stuff, and none of it 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,

Speaker 88 cupcakes or

Speaker 33 anything else that sandwich thins.

Speaker 52 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 86 Liz says, sure.

Speaker 63 In those documents, there's financial information, cost-saving strategies, etc.

Speaker 62 Confidential stuff, but that's in a different category than the ancient muffin trade secret.

Speaker 44 I can actually read it to you, this section.

Speaker 87 Okay, so documents in exhibits 9 through 25 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 cost structures for individual products by brand.

Speaker 44 All of this documentation is highly confidential, even within bimbo, and would be extremely harmful to bimbo in the hands of the competitor.

Speaker 45 You don't think that's sufficient?

Speaker 88 I agree that it was confidential. It's confidential, but it's not a trade secret.

Speaker 72 Bimbo leads with the nooks and crannies and the muffins.

Speaker 66 But in all the fine print of their complaint, nearly a nook nor a cranny.

Speaker 57 And yet Liz thinks that's really what this was all about.

Speaker 88 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.

Speaker 88 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

Speaker 88 maybe make a statement to

Speaker 88 people at Bimbo who might be thinking of stealing or peddling the English muffin secret, you know, that they were going to pursue them.

Speaker 70 What anyone on the outside of the case knows is the result. Chris got crushed.

Speaker 62 If you search this case online, you'll see an example made of it on all sorts of law firm websites.

Speaker 53 You'll find it in an introductory textbook for intellectual property law.

Speaker 33 But in none of those will you hear whether Bimbo Bakeries was truly able to hold its most legendary secret up under scrutiny.

Speaker 36 Because the case never went to trial.

Speaker 56 It was meant to go to trial, but Liz told me there wasn't money for a trial.

Speaker 63 The judge ruled in favor of Bimbo.

Speaker 47 Hostess told the New York Times, we have a business to run.

Speaker 63 We have to move on.

Speaker 55 Liz appealed appealed the case and lost.

Speaker 64 The ruling stood.

Speaker 53 Now, I'll grant you that Chris was not an ideal defendant, but this case had real consequences for his life.

Speaker 74 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 Thomas's now would have the right to go to court and get some subpoenas and ask questions of the new employer.

Speaker 74 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?

Speaker 74 Does 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.

Speaker 87 Beambo didn't respond to a request for comment by the time we recorded this episode.

Speaker 78 I tried for months to reach Chris Spotticella.

Speaker 47 Finally, I found an address, and I wrote him a letter.

Speaker 66 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.

Speaker 80 He writes, quote, you will never understand the impact that this had on my personal and professional life.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 61 But by this point, after reporting the story, I realized what this had meant, at least to Chris.

Speaker 53 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, at once futuristic and medieval, where every company had mystical codebooks full of secret recipes, a nook and cranny for every employee.

Speaker 60 Nooks and crannies is a shorthand for trade secret, but the actual trade secret of the nooks and crannies never came before a jury.

Speaker 57 I had learned that this controversy was, to my mind, unresolved.

Speaker 60 So we at Revisionist History decided to resolve it.

Speaker 61 We are trying to free the muffin.

Speaker 33 So we're

Speaker 54 reverse engineering the muffin recipe.

Speaker 76 Whoa, I kind of love this. Okay.

Speaker 72 Okay, don't tell people though.

Speaker 33 Next week, we attempt to crack the code of the English muffin.

Speaker 88 My question for you is, is this like you're trying to like create their exact product?

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 33 Can we make this exact English muffin?

Speaker 56 Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Nat of Haffrey, with Lucy Sullivan and Nina Bird-Lawrence. This episode was edited by Julia Barton.

Speaker 72 Special thanks to Jake Flanagan, Jordan Manikin, Greta Cohn, and Sarah Nix.

Speaker 67 Fact-checking on this episode by Kate Furby.

Speaker 58 Original scoring by Louis Gara.

Speaker 63 Mixing and mastering by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Speaker 54 I'm Ben Mattafaffri.

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