Most of the trade secret theft cases we read about relate to high-profile tech suits: Uber stealing from Waymo, Apple screwing over Qualcomm, or Huawei pilfering T-Mobile.
But here’s a new one: As the Chicago Tribune reports, popcorn maker CaramelCrisp has filed a federal suit claiming that one of its ex-employees heisted 5k top-secret files that “[put] its secret recipes at risk.”
It’s a reminder that even the nichest of niche businesses must go to battle to defend their trade secrets.
In sweeping terms, a trade secret is any information (be it a “formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process”) that gives a company a competitive edge, and derives financial value from not being known to the public.
The classic example is Coca-Cola’s secret recipe, which is known to only 2 living people and is supposedly locked in a multimillion-dollar vault…
According to CaramelCrisp (more commonly known as Garrett Popcorn), its popcorn recipes were available to only 3 employees, each of whom had to verify her identity with a biometric thumbprint for access.
Allegedly, one of these 3, former employee Aisha Putnam, got her salty little hands on “information about recipes, batch pricing, product weights, [and] production processes,” and shared them via email with competitors — an offense that can come with hefty restitution fees and jail time.
Believe it or not, a popcorn trade secret doesn’t even crack the list of strangest trade secret theft allegations we’ve read about:
As they say, the greatest secrets are usually hidden in the most unlikely places.