Protecting food product formulas is one of the most critical legal strategies for any food business. Commercial partners can more easily misappropriate recipes, ingredient blends, and process details because these elements aren’t eligible for patent protection. That’s why a strong NDA is just the starting point. To truly protect your formulas, food businesses need to think comprehensively—by harmonizing NDAs with non-compete and non-solicitation agreements across their entire network of employees, contractors, and co-manufacturers. When properly aligned, these agreements work together to preserve your competitive edge, reduce risk, and maintain control over the core intellectual property that defines your brand.
What Is A Trade Secret?
A “trade secret” is any information, like a food product recipe, that:
Derives economic value from not being generally known to the general public; and
Is the subject of reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy. Essentially, a trade secret is anything unknown to competitors that provides a competitive advantage for your business.
Examples of Trade Secrets
A food product formula is a quintessential example of a trade secret. It is the center of gravity for a successful food business. Common examples of trade secrets related to the food and beverage industry include but are not limited to:
- “Secret” blends of ingredients
- Recipe for a “signature” drink
- “Special” sauce used for a dish
What Is Confidential Information?
“Confidential Information” has no fixed definition in law. Most agreements define for themselves what “confidential information” means. They generally define it as “all the information shared by the parties during the course of their business dealings.”
Trade Secret vs Confidential Information
Trade Secrets and Confidential information are not mutually exclusive terms, and this lack of precision is detrimental to those with trade secrets to protect. The law distinguishes trade secrets from merely confidential information because only trade secrets require perpetual confidentiality to retain their status. Additionally, holders of “trade secrets” must take reasonable efforts to perpetually safeguard the information from disclosure. Trade secrets erode the minute the holder begins to fail to protect them, whether or not there is an actual breach.
Protecting Food Product Formulas
In our experience, food businesses chronically underestimate the economic value of product formulas and their other intellectual properties. To protect trade secrets, food businesses need to resort to comprehensive confidentiality agreements with everyone they do business with. Non-disclosure, non-circumvention, non-solicitation, and non-competition agreements collectively as confidentiality agreements.
Our best practice maintains trade secrets through a blend of practical and legal protections. For practical controls, we suggest information management and compartmentalization. For legal protections, we deploy coordinated legal agreements with employees and contractors.
Protecting food product formulas requires legal an d practical steps.
The Practical. You don’t need a lawyer or an NDA to help keep a secret that is not shared. Share trade secrets only when absolutely necessary to conduct a compelling business arrangement. Confidentiality agreements are great, but no one can leak information that they do not have. We encourage information compartmentalization as a routine, best practice for information control. Just like a food safety consultant does not need to know a company’s SEO strategy, there is no reason for the sales team to know the product formula, just its specifications.
The Legal. If you have to share information due to business necessity, deploy crisply-written confidentiality agreements. There are two fundamental features that every nondisclosure agreement needs:
- A distinction must be made between information that is merely confidential and information that is identified by the parties as trade secrets; and
- A term of perpetual confidentiality for the items of information described as “trade secrets”.
A nondisclosure consultation is a great introduction to trade secret law and trade secret management for a food business leader. Once the basic parameters are established, a more comprehensive strategy can be implemented for the long term protection of trade secrets.
The Comprehensive Approach
Third Party Service Providers. Businesses should require outside contractors to sign a nondisclosure agreement before any negotiation if the contractor will access confidential information or trade secrets. If the parties agree to do business, the terms of the commercial relationship should include enhanced terms of confidentiality, if applicable. Third party manufacturing agreements present the perfect opportunity to use non-competition clauses and non-circumvention clauses.
Employees. Employees that need access to trade secrets in order to do their jobs must have non disclosure terms in their employment agreements. Other kinds of restrictive covenants, particularly those that affect the post-employment opportunities of the employee, are trickier. State employment laws can limit an employer’s ability to impose restrictions on post-employment opportunities. This makes it difficult, for instance, to prohibit an employee from moving to another job in a competing organization. Employee restrictions that protect trade secrets are always supported by law. Companies need employment law counsel to add any other restrictions onto employees.
In any case, it never hurts to conduct an exit interview with an outbound employee and review the nondisclosure agreement they signed while employed, as a gentle reminder of their continuous obligation of confidentiality.
Protecting Food Product Formulas When Using Copackers
Anticipate How Trade Secrets Can Mutate. This is a special food industry consideration. Because co-packers frequently modify product formulas during scaling, the agreement should specify how such modifications will be treated.” If co packers make modifications to the recipe, ownership of those potentially new trade secret rights must accrue to the benefit of the food business. In a co packer agreement, these rights to modifications are “assigned” to the food business.
Think About the Supply Chain. If a product distributor creates a relationship with your copack manufacturer, say during the weekly product delivery, it may create a very tempting opportunity for the manufacturer and the distributor to cut the marketer out of the picture and go into business together with a competing product. If your distribution scheme requires contact between manufacturers and distributors, think about enhancing the co pack agreement with non-competition and non-circumvention clauses.
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