And nobody in the industry cares much about making 100% exact Coke, because their sales depend solely on advertising and branding. People buy it because it says ‘Coke’ on the label. Period.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a health nut and not a “gourmet”, just someone who truly loves decent food. I wouldn’t feed that kind of swill to my pigs!

Harvey Firestone was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the modern pneumatic vehicle tire (U.S. Patent No. 646,274)

The reason why food and beverage companies choose not to patent their recipes: Because they can’t.

A recipe is a way of recording an idea — the steps involved in a combining materials into a new produce that is substantially different from its ingredients.

Patent documents, as the article rightly says, are themselves recipes — detailed descriptions of the idea, its product and the steps required to produce that product. All this must be disclosed to get a patent.

But as everybody knows, not everything can be patented. You certainly can’t patent an idea that has already been patented by somebody else. And they don’t issue patents for something that is impossible to make. No patents, therefore, for alleged perpetual motion machines.

Well, they don’t issue patents for so-called ‘obvious inventions.’

Most food recipes fall under this category.

There are plenty of patents issued for new products made from common ingredients. But that new product must not be ‘obvious.’ It’s a rare thing when an inventor discovers that basic components can be combined to create something new — Rubber and heat existed before Harvey Firestone combined them to create tough vulcanized rubber, but it was not obvious to do so and he won the benefit of patent protection for his idea.

It’s hard to prove to patent clerks that making food out of ingredients already generally regarded as food is not obvious or worthy of patent protection.

Paradoxically, a cook might would be more likely to get a patent on a food recipe if one or more of the ingredients were things not generally regarded as food.

Sanders did invent a not obvious method for pressure deep-frying that was new. For this he received a patent and exclusive marketing rights for a limited time.

However, his namesake company keeps its recipe for the chicken it puts into those fryers secret because that’s the only way to protect it.

KFC, like Coca-Cola, must protect their recipes with secrecy (if only for the drama that creates) because the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is not going to protect it for them.