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by - September 10, 2008 - 10:42 PM
Earlier this week, KFC removed Colonel Harland Sanders’ original handwritten recipe of 11 herbs and spices that go into the company’s signature fried chicken from its safe storage place. The 68-year-old recipe had been resting in a locked filing cabinet inside a vault at the company’s Louisville headquarters, and it was only removed under the watchful eyes of many guards so the company could upgrade the security around the piece of paper. Why all the fuss? Are these measures just publicity-seeking theatrics for KFC? Why does KFC need to keep the recipe under lock and key anyway?
The KFC recipe is part of a larger class of corporate knowledge known as trade secrets. Broadly defined, a trade secret is a process (think of things like Web search algorithms), formula, practice, design, or other secret information to which the public doesn’t have access that allows a company to gain a competitive advantage over the rest of its industry. In this case, KFC feels that its spice blend enables the company to make particularly delicious chicken that’s differentiated from the rest of the fried-chicken market. The public seems to agree; KFC raked in over $5 billion in domestic sales last year. If another chicken company got their hands on this spice blend, they could conceivably replicate the delicious fried poultry and effectively eat away at KFC’s market share. As such, KFC maintains its recipe as a trade secret to keep competitors at bay.
If KFC wants to protect its recipe, why doesn’t it just get a patent?
Because then the cat would be out of the bag on what the 11 spices are. In order to acquire a patent, a company has to give pretty exhaustive information on what it’s patenting to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. If the office granted a patent, the information would then become public. Although KFC would have a temporary monopoly (usually for 20 years) on that particular recipe, every chicken shack owner in the country could start toying with the recipe, making little tweaks to it, and potentially coming up with something even better. None of that would be good for the Colonel. But by keeping the recipe a closely guarded secret, the company can theoretically keep its advantage forever. Since apparently no one has the first clue what the 11 spices are, much less the proportions in which they’re mixed, the company can feel safe as long as it guards the recipe.
Companies with these sorts of trade secrets generally make employees sign non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements, so the select few who get to see the recipe don’t run off and start their own chicken businesses. Anyone who tries to swipe a trade secret through espionage should be ready for a lot of legal liability and potential jail time. Just ask Kate Hudson, who came under fire last month for allegedly pilfering a trade secret in the formulation of her new hair-care products.
Does that mean there’s no way we’ll ever see another company selling KFC’s chicken?
Not quite. One downside of a trade secret is that it’s perfectly legal for competitors to try to reverse engineer someone else’s product. You want to make KFC chicken legally? Get in the kitchen and tinker with spice blends until you figure out the one that tastes just like it. Alternatively, if a chef serendipitously came up with the spice blend independently without sneaking a peak at KFC’s recipe, she could start legally trafficking in the bird.
The KFC spice blend is just one example of a jealously guarded trade secret, though. Here are a few other notable ones:
The Coca-Cola Formula
The Coca-Cola formula, which is known by the code name “Merchandise 7X,” is possibly the best-known trade secret in the world. The formula, which dates back to the drink’s 1886 invention by Joseph S. Pemberton, is written on a piece of paper that resides in an Atlanta bank. Despite decades of attempts to figure out the formula, no one has succeeded yet; these failures are why the knock-off store brand sodas you buy never taste quite like the real thing. Coke is not afraid to go to great lengths to maintain the secrecy of the formula. In 1977 the Indian government demanded that the company reveal the recipe to keep its ability to sell the beverage in India. Coke decided it would rather leave the market altogether rather than give up its secret; you couldn’t buy a Coca-Cola in India until the government relented in 1993.
McDonald’s “Special Sauce”
We all know the Big Mac jingle. What we don’t know is exactly how to make the sauce. The burger itself was originally conceived in Pittsburgh to compete with Big Boy’s signature burger, but it was so popular it had to get a national audience. The sauce is pretty analogous to Thousand Island dressing, but the actual formulation remains a secret sought by beef aficionados everywhere.
The Krispy Kreme Recipe
Krispy Kreme opened in Winston-Salem, NC, in 1937 after founder Vernon Rudolph bought a secret recipe for yeast donuts from a New Orleans chef. Despite the company’s meteoric rise over the last seven decades, the recipe remains locked in a vault in Winston-Salem and is known by only a select few. (As someone who went to college in Winston-Salem and ate way too many Krispy Kremes, my educated guess is that the secret ingredient is either awesomeness or love. Possibly both.)
Google AdWords
AdWords is Google’s advertising product that places pay-per-click banner and text ads throughout the Web and provides site-targeted ads. The system is certainly successful; it pulled in over $16 billion last year. How do the ads get placed on individual pages, though? Good question, but it’s one that will remain a mystery since the algorithm is a trade secret.
Gillette Razor Designs
Here’s an example of why you don’t want to steal a trade secret. In 1997, Wright Industries was helping Gillette design a new razor that was extremely confidential and potentially valuable. Wright Industries employee Steven L. Davis worried that his job was in jeopardy and had a grudge against his supervisor, so he swiped a bunch of trade secrets, including drawings of razor designs and data and sent them to Bic, Warner-Lambert, and other competitors. Bad move. The 1996 Congressional passing of the Economic Espionage Act made stealing trade secrets a federal crime. Davis pled guilty to five counts of theft of trade secrets and received a sentence of 27 months in jail and over a million dollars in fines.
Ethan Trex co-writes Straight Cash, Homey, the Internet’s undisputed top source for pictures of people in Ryan Leaf jerseys.
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Comments (31)
Comment
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Everybody knows that the Colonel and his recipe are evil–part of a society of people who secretly rule the world called The Pentaverate.
Aww, dang. This post made me need to watch So I Married an Axe Murderer again.
posted by JenPo on 9-10-2008 at 11:16 pm
You want to know what the secret KFC ingredient is?
MSG.
KFC contains more MSG in their food than any other fast chain, in fact just about everything on their menu has lots of it. That’s what keeps that chicken Finger Lickin Good!
posted by Paul on 9-10-2008 at 11:56 pm
I think you’re right, Paul.
In “Big Secrets” by William Poundstone, the secret recipe is discussed at length. On page 14: “In 1974, Esquire magazine asked four food writers to try KFC and offer their analyses. There was little consensus.” Three of the writers are all over the place and the other one only tasted cinnamon and cloves. The book then describes how they set up a testing facility near a KFC and obtained a packet of the “coating mix”, which the employees swore is the only thing used to treat the chicken before frying. Testing it, they found the only seasonings in it were salt, black pepper and a generous helping of MSG. This, of course, provides the flavor “umami”, or fifth of the basic tastes the tongue can detect, normally described as “heartiness”
The book conjectures that the popularity of KFC can be attributed to the frying process, which does have a patent: Harland Sanders’ 1966 patent for a “process of producing fried chicken under pressure”, No. 3,245,800. It cooks the chicken at a pressure of 15 psi at around 400 degrees for about two minutes, then it is lowered to 250. The whole process takes about 10 minutes.
posted by Boggy Creek Creature on 9-11-2008 at 1:22 am
Rabbis need to see the “secret formulas” in order to certify them as kosher.
posted by MetFanMac on 9-11-2008 at 2:32 am
Wasn’t it recently that a woman was arrested for trying to sell off some of Coke’s secrets to Pepsi? I believe Pepsi turned her (and her accomplices) in.
posted by Beth on 9-11-2008 at 8:27 am
That is true, Beth. Kinda neat that Pepsi helped in the sting! I guess there is a certain respect in the Cola Wars!
posted by Marty on 9-11-2008 at 8:44 am
If there is MSG in KFC, they’d have to tell people, right? Remember that there are people who are particularly sensitive to the food flavorant. It’s part of the reason why Chinese food restaurants announce that there is or isn’t MSG in their products. (I thought there was some kind of law about this: I remember in my hometown all restaurants that used MSG or might use it in their cooking needed to announce that they did or didn’t use it somewhere, even if it was at the bottom of the menu. That was back in NY years ago, and I haven’t paid much attention since.)
Kind of like telling people that something was prepared with or around nuts.
Even if they don’t have to announce it, I haven’t heard of anyone up in arms about getting weird reactions to KFC the way some people did about Chinese food not too too long ago.
::shrugs:: I could be wrong, though.
posted by ACute Angle on 9-11-2008 at 9:21 am
I think this is a lil out of hand, i would think that they would tell people they put MSG in their ingredients but who knows…since it’s such top secret
this is almost rediculous, i’d rather read about Col. Sanders trying to catch Pam Anderson from stealing the recipe! lol
posted by Mirisa on 9-11-2008 at 9:38 am
Despite the company’s meteoric rise over the last seven decades…
Meteoric = fast
seven decades = hmmm… not so fast
posted by KJ on 9-11-2008 at 9:57 am
Interesting stuff, and great picture of the colonel.
I’m going to have to check out this ‘Big Secrets’ book.
posted by Will on 9-11-2008 at 10:40 am
Popeyes is tastier
and thats all I have to say about that
posted by Laura on 9-11-2008 at 11:08 am
I used to work for medical equipment manufacturer. An employee went to work for a competitor and took the design for a particular type of valve with him.
However, the bosses had suspected he was getting ready to jump ship and that he might do something like that, so they let him. What he didn’t know was that they had determined that there was an inherent flaw to the design, and by allowing him to take it to their competitor, who promptly spent oodles of cash trying to get it to work, they got rid of a jerk employee AND set the competition back months, if not years.
posted by Anthony on 9-11-2008 at 11:43 am
Are you ready? I will now reveal several trade secrets. Hopefully my life isn’t ruined by doing this.
KFC: MSG, sugar, salt, fat.
Coke: Sugar.
Krispey Kream: Sugar, fat.
McDonald’s Special sauce: sugar, salt, fat.
The only real “trade secrets” here are Google Adwords and the razor designs. All the rest are poor advertising schemes to dope people into thinking that the product their consuming is more than just a lump of unhealthy crap.
posted by Josiah on 9-11-2008 at 11:47 am
For drink aficionados, I think the Angostura bitters recipe is also closely guarded. When they moved the recipe a few years ago, I think they did it one ingredient at a time and only sent the next one when the first had arrived safely.
posted by Craig on 9-11-2008 at 11:54 am
I, too, call BS on the salt-pepper-MSG theory. I had a friend in college who was extremely sensitive to MSG, and it’s not something you want to mess around with. If a major restaurant chain was dousing their products with MSG, there would have been major exposes on the major news stations a while back. It’s just a rumor, like the one about Red Dye #40 being made from crushed insects: There is (or was at one point) a grain of truth in it, but it’s long since been debunked.
reCAPTCHA: it mustard. Kinda fitting.
posted by Joanna on 9-11-2008 at 2:54 pm
Re: Angostura Bitters – I actually live in the country that makes this (Trinidad and Tobago). I went on a tour of the plant a couple of years ago. The ingredients would come down a chute one item a time, pre measured – no one in the mixing room knew what they were mixing, or how much of each; they just knew that the first 3 ingredients to come down the chute would go to one hopper, the next 2 would go somewhere else, etc etc. It was pretty cool. Only ONE guy in the entire factory knew the recipe and no one knew who he was – he worked in such secrecy in the labs and (supposedly) came and left under cover of darkness.
posted by Dee on 9-12-2008 at 9:06 am
There was an issue with capacitors on motherboards going bad several years ago. Turns out an employee of one company copied the info on how to make them incorrectly before he bolted for another company, resulting in many angry computer repair techs. Just do a search on motherboard bad caps for more info.
posted by Jack on 9-17-2008 at 8:15 pm
I dont know if I believe in the KFC thing… Tastes like regular fried chicken to me…
A good, old-fashioned ice-cold Coke in a glass bottle? Irreplaceable.
posted by GTT on 9-23-2008 at 5:51 pm
ONe day I ran out of my normal fried chicken spices and played around with others. It only took 4 and I re-created KFC extra crispy chicken.
Josiah is wrong on Mac sauce. I worked there when we had a 99c sale on macs and we ran out of sauce. You dan’t ever forget how to make something after making that many gallons of it. All I’ll say (no, they don’t make you sign a non-disclosure) is it’s easier then tarter sauce to make
posted by Lorelei on 10-21-2008 at 10:53 pm
The KFC recipe is actually just flour, oil and heroin. The last one is the big secret. Perhaps love as well. But only the kind of love a man in a white suit, string bowtie, while drinking a mint julep can give.
posted by MC on 9-25-2009 at 10:52 am
Dee, I love the Agnostura bitters story!
posted by taylor on 9-25-2009 at 11:47 am
The Big Mac sauce is very easy to replicate. I checked around and found the same copycat recipe on several different websites. The taste is indistinguishable from the sauce at McD’s, and I make it all the time.
posted by Michigan Mom on 9-25-2009 at 12:02 pm
I think the belief that people are sensitive to MSG has been widely disproven. Some people seem convinced that they are, because they may feel bad after eating Chinese food, but refuse to believe that this may be caused by something else. Statistical studies bear this out:
While many people believe that MSG is the cause of these symptoms, a statistical association has not been demonstrated under controlled conditions, even in studies with people who were convinced that they were sensitive to it.[12][13][14][15] Adequately controlling for experimental bias includes a placebo-controlled double-blinded experimental design and the application in capsules because of the strong and unique after-taste of glutamates.[13]
^ a b Geha RS, Beiser A, Ren C, et al. (April 2000). “Review of alleged reaction to monosodium glutamate and outcome of a multicenter double-blind placebo-controlled study”. J. Nutr. 130 (4S Suppl): 1058S–62S. PMID 10736382. http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=long&pmid=10736382.
^ a b Tarasoff L., Kelly M.F. (1993). “Monosodium L-glutamate: a double-blind study and review”. Food Chem. Toxicol. 31 (12): 1019–1035. doi:10.1016/0278-6915(93)90012-N. PMID 8282275.
^ Freeman M. (October 2006). “Reconsidering the effects of monosodium glutamate: a literature review”. J Am Acad Nurse Pract 18 (10): 482–6. doi:10.1111/j.1745-7599.2006.00160.x. PMID 16999713.
^ Walker R (October 1999). “The significance of excursions above the ADI. Case study: monosodium glutamate”. Regul. Toxicol. Pharmacol. 30 (2 Pt 2): S119–S121. doi:10.1006/rtph.1999.1337. PMID 10597625
posted by TheBear on 9-25-2009 at 1:26 pm
I worked at Kripy Kreme for 3 years, noone in any store knows anything that goes into the doghuts, it is simply water, yeast, “brew (a mix of yeast, water and something called stableizer) and the pre mix, which was all the flour eggs baking powder and so on. I assume it was the brew, I made a batch with out it and they came out thick like dunkin doughnuts, but when the brew was not missing you got the fluffy doughnuts they are famous for. the brew is a stinky mixture, kinda smells like beer that isnt quite ready yet.
posted by Jeremiah on 9-25-2009 at 5:50 pm
No one is requried to say if they have MSG in there food or not (the store shevels would be bare if the did. 90% of food sold at stores have it).It was trans fat that is baned.
Mcdonalds special is easy all the same amount of thousand island dressing, butter milk ranch, and mayo.
when i figure out kfc ill post it. i have been working on it
posted by mickey on 9-27-2009 at 9:18 am
Not that this really has much to do with the article… but, I know I’m not alone here… the diet Coke at McDonalds tastes better compared to anywhere else. I didn’t understand why, but I’ve since found out that McDonalds uses something called Premium Coke, not regular Coke.
posted by Nurse Monica on 10-23-2009 at 11:27 pm
KFC varies a bit from store to store & for me “Ollies Trolley’s” was close enough I wouldn’t pick ‘em blindfolded. Possibly Coke (or coke, or coke) is one of KFC’s ingredients & thus KFC don’t know what they’re serving! One of the ingredients is cock, or hen.
posted by Galvo on 10-29-2009 at 2:35 am
Yes, KFC uses much MSG. Search for it and a link to their website can be found with an ingredients/allergens list. The chicken is marinated in it and it is also included in the breading. MSG is listed by names as used in their other products, such as gravy and even green beans. In some products, it’s fairly high on the ingredients list.
Modified starches/proteins can also contain glutamates as well as ingredients listed as being hydrolyzed or autolyzed, such as yeasts.
While some symptoms may be caused by other factors when consuming certain foods, sensitivity can develop in some from the current high-usage of MSG. The quantities and chemical substitutes for ‘flavor’ placed in processed and ready-made foods have dramatically increased over the decades which likely contributes overall to adverse health reactions.
Carmine, also called carmic acid, is derived from insects.
posted by Passin' through on 10-29-2009 at 3:22 pm
A long time ago I saw a TV show that showed a machine that could burn different things and come up with an estimate of what it contained. I wonder if there is such a machine and if there is why don’t companies use this to find out what the ingredients are for different products?
posted by R Brown on 10-30-2009 at 9:29 am
For those who think Coke, KFC, et al. go to excessive “theatrics” over their trade secrets, part of the legal definition of a trade secret is that reasonable steps are taken to maintain the secrecy of the information. So if Coke didn’t keep the most valuable trade secret in the world under serious lock and key, they’d jeopardize the legal protection trade secret laws offer them.
But these are just the classic examples of trade secrets — just about every company has some, and just as many people steal them on their way out the door.
It would be truly amazing, but if I’ve learned anything from the practice of law, it’s that the intersection of human ingenuity and human stupidity is . . .
really rather profitable.
posted by Employment Lawyer on 11-3-2009 at 1:06 pm
with regards to the rabbis, they have to reveal the ingredients, and can include extra ones that “may” be in it, proportions are not required.
posted by moonablaze on 11-6-2009 at 12:20 pm