It just so happens that I saw this posted to another community I belong to yesterday. Here's a lightly edited version of what I responded there: I don't want to step on anyone's toes here, but...
It just so happens that I saw this posted to another community I belong to yesterday. Here's a lightly edited version of what I responded there:
I don't want to step on anyone's toes here, but this article reads as very naive and is reaching really hard to vilify this company. The stuff that it talks about are the same thing that every single food contractor works; it doesn't matter if you're talking about Trader Joe's brands or Walmart's Great Value or Costco's Kirkland. You go around to a number of producers and find who can give you the best prices for whatever level of quality you find acceptable. The fact that they didn't contract with Brooklyn Dehli's Achaar does not mean that they stole the product from them; they just chose a different supplier.
They say that they need to take advantage of ethnic food brands to get the expertise needed to produce these foodstuffs, but that doesn't really check out when they could instead just hire one of the millions of people from that culture as a consultant to help them out. Trader Joe's is built on low prices, so it makes perfect sense that a niche food company would not be able to work with the volumes required to get the prices down.
This is very much a "don't hate the player, hate the game" thing. The fact that these companies can't compete on price is very normal in a working economy. If you don't want this kind of thing to happen, you have to either abolish capitalism or put some extremely strict and invasive laws into place. If life didn't work this way everyone would be eating Hydrox cookies and nobody would know what an Oreo is.
I also have to point out how much extra this article does to try to drag Trader Joe's through the mud. There are stupid small things like calling their granola "proprietary" (while also noting that there is no protections on recipes), and then there are some frankly unhinged things like how they compare the price of one good with an option at Whole Foods Market, which is famous for selling extremely expensive food!
I work in industrial food supply chains and everyone knows to be careful who you reveal any information to. Your suppliers and recipes take a lot of work to procure, so you have to make sure there...
I work in industrial food supply chains and everyone knows to be careful who you reveal any information to. Your suppliers and recipes take a lot of work to procure, so you have to make sure there are NDAs and assurances in place to prevent someone from poaching your work.
Trader Joe's is still being pretty scummy by screwing people over, but it's very likely someone else would screw them if not for Trader Joe's.
Edit: Also, Trader Joe's reputation will hurt them in the long run. Every small food manufacturer is going to know that Trader Joe's isn't someone they will risk working with.
But the founders I spoke to, who share years of extensive experience collaborating with other major food retailers, including companies that also offer private label products in their stores like Costco, Target, and Whole Foods, all described Trader Joe’s shadowy tactics as an outlier in the industry. They’re left wondering whether Trader Joe’s negotiates with prospective partners in good faith.
Reputation matters a lot. This may work for them in the short term, but it will catch up with them eventually.
Yeah, especially since Trader Joe's has tried to foster a "friendly" "neighborhood grocery store" image for itself too. So them essentially stealing smaller manufacturers' product ideas,...
Yeah, especially since Trader Joe's has tried to foster a "friendly" "neighborhood grocery store" image for itself too. So them essentially stealing smaller manufacturers' product ideas, especially in such an underhanded way like that, flies in the face of that image.
I really don't know if it will. This isn't something that Trader Joe's has just started doing; it's been their MO for decades. For the record, I do think that these practices are scummy, too. I...
I really don't know if it will. This isn't something that Trader Joe's has just started doing; it's been their MO for decades.
For the record, I do think that these practices are scummy, too. I think it's good to expose this practice, especially if it might mean that one less small business owner will avoid getting fleeced, but this piece just came across as a hit piece - as if the author had a personal bone to pick or something.
I know it's tangential to the topic at hand, but Trader Joe's is shitty in more ways than just this. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/10/starbucks-trader-joes-spacex-challenge-labor-board
I know it's tangential to the topic at hand, but Trader Joe's is shitty in more ways than just this.
The founder hated unions. The whole reason Trader Joe's has high pay etc is that he figured it was more effective for the company than dealing with unions. To be fair, it is a different position...
The problem with unions is not their pay scales; it’s their work rules and seniority rules.
The founder hated unions. The whole reason Trader Joe's has high pay etc is that he figured it was more effective for the company than dealing with unions. To be fair, it is a different position than Walmart and the like.
Facts aren't copyrightable. Recipes are facts; you take flour and sugar and eggs and oil and water, mix, bake, and you have a cake. That's a set of facts, from the ingredients to the preparation....
Facts aren't copyrightable. Recipes are facts; you take flour and sugar and eggs and oil and water, mix, bake, and you have a cake. That's a set of facts, from the ingredients to the preparation.
How does a society, an economy, work where someone is allowed to own the concept of pizza, or cake, or bread, or hamburgers, or green tea Thai noodles with spicy peanut sauce over lightly breaded chicken? It wouldn't. People gotta eat.
It's almost impossible to patent a recipe too. Some of the factors for a patent include how obvious it is, and how novel (new) it is. How likely it is some chef actually has figured out a never before considered or tried combination of ingredients? One that a search through hundreds of years of cookbooks will prove doesn't exist? Not very.
You're a bit more likely to be able to patent a food process, such as a very specific (and, again, not-novel and not-obvious) method of preparation. You're still climbing uphill in the attempt though since every single human eats at least two or three times a day, which is a lot of food that's been turned out over the centuries.
Any company that wants to compete in the market for food pretty much has to do it on something other than exclusivity. Unless they can maintain their secrecy. As I remember semi-recently, the guy who "invented" cronuts wouldn't share the recipe. For a reason. Recipes aren't copyrightable.
Other chefs experimented, and came up with similar recipes. Eventually he wrote a cookbook and included the recipe (about two years later), once others had caught up with him and his only option was to try to cash in one more time as the "originator". But for a period he had a monopoly since he'd sort of "invented" something no one else was doing.
He did trademark the name "cronut", which is allowed and was kind of smart, but I don't know how much value he got out being the only baker allowed to call a flaky pastry layer doughnut a cronut. Especially since I just Googled and saw "cronuts" available at local bakers (unless they've all licensed it from him, that I don't know about). But it was his money he spent trademarking it, so it was his call to make.
If someone feels they have a "special" recipe, and are looking to go mass market, lawyers invented these things called NDAs. Of course, to enforce them, you have to pay lawyers (clever that; this gives you leverage, but you can only leverage your leverage if you keep paying us, the lawyers) or a broken NDA has no penalty.
But honestly, they're recipes. Even the cronut wasn't really a "new" thing; it was just a doughnut with flaky layers, more or less. But barring very, very rare "exceptions", there's no original in food. As soon as your "secret recipe" hits the market, it'll be copied. That's what skilled chefs do; understand ingredients and cooking and how to get a taste or mouth sensation when they want to.
So original isn't a thing in food. There's just "oh, no one's done that recently." Why else does one think chefs and youtubers and influencers and columnists keep mining old, old, old sources for "new" food?
Bottom line, it's not stealing for anyone, company or individual, to begin using the same recipe. It just isn't. If someone cares that much about their recipe, and doesn't feel they can compete on price or quality or service leaving only exclusivity as their only edge, then they're in the wrong business.
Doesn't change the fact that Trader Joe's behavior here is pretty suspect. You can be "in the right" legally and still be an asshole, especially when it comes to big corporations harming small...
Doesn't change the fact that Trader Joe's behavior here is pretty suspect. You can be "in the right" legally and still be an asshole, especially when it comes to big corporations harming small businesses
After six months of conversations with five founders of small to midsize food brands, it appears to be an open secret in the consumer packaged goods industry that Trader Joe’s outsources inspiration for new products by targeting emerging brands under the guise of recruiting them to manufacture private-label items. Private labeling is the ubiquitous (and often clandestine) practice of consumer food brands creating exclusive products for third-party retailers. The terms of these contracts vary, but the enlisted food brand typically receives compensation in the form of a production fee or profit-sharing arrangement.
According to these sources, Trader Joe’s commonly solicits product samples and even asks for potential recipe adjustments—a revealing and time-consuming exercise for bootstrapped founders—before inexplicably abandoning the negotiations and releasing its own private-label versions of similar products at lower prices.
The Monrovia, California–based Trader Joe’s, which owns and operates 545 stores in 42 states plus Washington, DC, is a widely loved brand with a motivated fan base. Trader Joe’s aficionados regularly brave crowded stores and long lines to stock up on signature frozen meals, like its wildly popular Mandarin Orange Chicken and Cauliflower Gnocchi, as well as quirky private-label snacks like Peanut Butter Filled Pretzel Nuggets and Baked Cheese Crunchies. But behind the kitschy grocery chain’s public face, with its superficial good vibes and Hawaiian-shirted cashiers, is a litany of thorny ethics and questionable business practices surrounding how it handles sourcing and packaging certain private-label ethnic food products.
It just so happens that I saw this posted to another community I belong to yesterday. Here's a lightly edited version of what I responded there:
I don't want to step on anyone's toes here, but this article reads as very naive and is reaching really hard to vilify this company. The stuff that it talks about are the same thing that every single food contractor works; it doesn't matter if you're talking about Trader Joe's brands or Walmart's Great Value or Costco's Kirkland. You go around to a number of producers and find who can give you the best prices for whatever level of quality you find acceptable. The fact that they didn't contract with Brooklyn Dehli's Achaar does not mean that they stole the product from them; they just chose a different supplier.
They say that they need to take advantage of ethnic food brands to get the expertise needed to produce these foodstuffs, but that doesn't really check out when they could instead just hire one of the millions of people from that culture as a consultant to help them out. Trader Joe's is built on low prices, so it makes perfect sense that a niche food company would not be able to work with the volumes required to get the prices down.
This is very much a "don't hate the player, hate the game" thing. The fact that these companies can't compete on price is very normal in a working economy. If you don't want this kind of thing to happen, you have to either abolish capitalism or put some extremely strict and invasive laws into place. If life didn't work this way everyone would be eating Hydrox cookies and nobody would know what an Oreo is.
I also have to point out how much extra this article does to try to drag Trader Joe's through the mud. There are stupid small things like calling their granola "proprietary" (while also noting that there is no protections on recipes), and then there are some frankly unhinged things like how they compare the price of one good with an option at Whole Foods Market, which is famous for selling extremely expensive food!
I work in industrial food supply chains and everyone knows to be careful who you reveal any information to. Your suppliers and recipes take a lot of work to procure, so you have to make sure there are NDAs and assurances in place to prevent someone from poaching your work.
Trader Joe's is still being pretty scummy by screwing people over, but it's very likely someone else would screw them if not for Trader Joe's.
Edit: Also, Trader Joe's reputation will hurt them in the long run. Every small food manufacturer is going to know that Trader Joe's isn't someone they will risk working with.
Reputation matters a lot. This may work for them in the short term, but it will catch up with them eventually.
Yeah, especially since Trader Joe's has tried to foster a "friendly" "neighborhood grocery store" image for itself too. So them essentially stealing smaller manufacturers' product ideas, especially in such an underhanded way like that, flies in the face of that image.
I really don't know if it will. This isn't something that Trader Joe's has just started doing; it's been their MO for decades.
For the record, I do think that these practices are scummy, too. I think it's good to expose this practice, especially if it might mean that one less small business owner will avoid getting fleeced, but this piece just came across as a hit piece - as if the author had a personal bone to pick or something.
I know it's tangential to the topic at hand, but Trader Joe's is shitty in more ways than just this.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/10/starbucks-trader-joes-spacex-challenge-labor-board
The founder hated unions. The whole reason Trader Joe's has high pay etc is that he figured it was more effective for the company than dealing with unions. To be fair, it is a different position than Walmart and the like.
Facts aren't copyrightable. Recipes are facts; you take flour and sugar and eggs and oil and water, mix, bake, and you have a cake. That's a set of facts, from the ingredients to the preparation.
How does a society, an economy, work where someone is allowed to own the concept of pizza, or cake, or bread, or hamburgers, or green tea Thai noodles with spicy peanut sauce over lightly breaded chicken? It wouldn't. People gotta eat.
It's almost impossible to patent a recipe too. Some of the factors for a patent include how obvious it is, and how novel (new) it is. How likely it is some chef actually has figured out a never before considered or tried combination of ingredients? One that a search through hundreds of years of cookbooks will prove doesn't exist? Not very.
You're a bit more likely to be able to patent a food process, such as a very specific (and, again, not-novel and not-obvious) method of preparation. You're still climbing uphill in the attempt though since every single human eats at least two or three times a day, which is a lot of food that's been turned out over the centuries.
Any company that wants to compete in the market for food pretty much has to do it on something other than exclusivity. Unless they can maintain their secrecy. As I remember semi-recently, the guy who "invented" cronuts wouldn't share the recipe. For a reason. Recipes aren't copyrightable.
Other chefs experimented, and came up with similar recipes. Eventually he wrote a cookbook and included the recipe (about two years later), once others had caught up with him and his only option was to try to cash in one more time as the "originator". But for a period he had a monopoly since he'd sort of "invented" something no one else was doing.
He did trademark the name "cronut", which is allowed and was kind of smart, but I don't know how much value he got out being the only baker allowed to call a flaky pastry layer doughnut a cronut. Especially since I just Googled and saw "cronuts" available at local bakers (unless they've all licensed it from him, that I don't know about). But it was his money he spent trademarking it, so it was his call to make.
If someone feels they have a "special" recipe, and are looking to go mass market, lawyers invented these things called NDAs. Of course, to enforce them, you have to pay lawyers (clever that; this gives you leverage, but you can only leverage your leverage if you keep paying us, the lawyers) or a broken NDA has no penalty.
But honestly, they're recipes. Even the cronut wasn't really a "new" thing; it was just a doughnut with flaky layers, more or less. But barring very, very rare "exceptions", there's no original in food. As soon as your "secret recipe" hits the market, it'll be copied. That's what skilled chefs do; understand ingredients and cooking and how to get a taste or mouth sensation when they want to.
So original isn't a thing in food. There's just "oh, no one's done that recently." Why else does one think chefs and youtubers and influencers and columnists keep mining old, old, old sources for "new" food?
Bottom line, it's not stealing for anyone, company or individual, to begin using the same recipe. It just isn't. If someone cares that much about their recipe, and doesn't feel they can compete on price or quality or service leaving only exclusivity as their only edge, then they're in the wrong business.
Doesn't change the fact that Trader Joe's behavior here is pretty suspect. You can be "in the right" legally and still be an asshole, especially when it comes to big corporations harming small businesses
Edit: spelling
Funny they use Joe-Joe’s as an example of an Oreo knock off, when Oreos are a knock off of Hydrox.