Tips and Tricks for Protecting Your Recipes

A hot new restaurant launches, and everyone is raving about that one special dish.  Maybe it’s a new technique for crafting the creamiest macaroni and cheese or the fluffiest pizza dough.  Perhaps it’s even grandma’s gooey chocolate-chip-cookie recipe.  The restaurant rides the wave of success for a few months, and then disaster falls.  A formerly trusted chef absconds with the recipe and opens a competing restaurant across town.  Or, an adversary reverse engineers the product and starts selling it in supermarkets. What could these restaurant operators have done to better protect their most valuable asset? 

Unfortunately, recipes are infamously challenging to protect.  Many traditional methods for protecting other forms of intellectual property, like a technological innovation or clothing design, fall short.  Here, we take a look at trademark, copyright, patent, and trade secret law, and evaluate the drawbacks and benefits of each for protecting…