Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog
You might think of making popcorn as a fairly simple process: you pop the popcorn, coat it in your flavor of choice, package it and sell it. But the fact is that snack food manufacturers invest an incredible amount of time, money, and resources into crafting recipes that are perfectly addictive, then test and retest those recipes before they start putting them on shelves.
Garrett Popcorn Shops says it guards the secret to its popcorn recipes so closely that only three employees are given access to the recipes and they have to prove their identity with a fingerprint scan before they can access the recipes.
Aisha Putnam was one of the three employees with access to Garrett Popcorn Shops’ incredibly valuable recipes in the four years she worked as the company’s director of research and development. She was fired in early March of this year, but she got a heads up that she was going to be fired and so she allegedly stole more than 5,400 files using a USB drive and her personal email. The files allegedly contained everything that had ever been shared with her and/or stored on her computer: from the company’s top secret recipes and production processes to pricing information, supplier information, distribution agreements, and market research. Continue reading ›