We are now into week three of the latest series of The Apprentice, and already three candidates have been fired. Spoiler: in week two, the all-boys team (the poop book team) lost, and the project manager was fired.

As this new series progresses, I’ve noticed there has been a stark change in the format of the episodes of The Apprentice. For some reason, the winning team is no longer rewarded with the lavish treats as they have been in previous series. This might be due to the current contestants being probably the worst batch yet, and therefore Lord Sugar feels that even the teams that ‘win’ the task don’t actually deserve it. Either that or the BBC budget can no longer stretch to paying for said rewards. Quite sad, really, because normally when we see the B-roll of the winning team on their reward, there is always one person who didn’t really contribute to the win but claims they are the sole reason for winning. Another tradition that seems to have gone the same way as the rewards is the extensive arguments that occur between the members of the losing team in the famous losers’ café. Perhaps all the budget for this series was blown in the first episode, sending them all to Hong Kong?

The Third Task

In the third week, the teams were fully mixed up. Lord Sugar told one team they would be given 25kg of chicken and the other team would be given 25kg of eggs. The task: create a dish to sell to the public the next day at a food market. The team that makes the most profit wins. Alongside the dish for the public, the teams were also each given a corporate client to meet with and agree on a price plan for curating bespoke canapes. I felt quite bad for the egg team. How many fancy canapes consist of a boiled egg?

Another tradition that has vanished in this series is the teams choosing their own team name. Instead, Lord Sugar announced that the egg team would be team Eclipse and the chicken team would be team Alpha. This also made me sad, watching candidates come up with ridiculous names for the teams is always a good highlight of the series. I am pretty sure one year, a candidate tried to suggest the name Typhoid…

Whilst one half of each team went to meet with the corporate client, the other half of the team headed to the kitchens to figure out what to put in their dish for the public and order ingredients. Team Chicken settled on making a chicken and mushroom pie with the idea of being able to upsell the pie with add-ons such as mashed potatoes. Team Egg decided to make a pasta carbonara dish. Team Egg made so many questionable decisions. The main one being, out of the four people that went to the kitchen to taste-test carbonara dishes: one of them didn’t eat eggs (just didn’t like them), another one didn’t eat cheese (they just don’t like cheese, most upsetting revelation of the episode[1]), and a third can’t eat pork for religious reasons. This meant only one person on the dish creation team could actually taste the food! Furthermore, the person who didn’t like eggs was voted as project manager! Why would you put yourself forward for project manager on Team Egg if you don’t like eggs??

In the episode, we didn’t get the full recipes for the dishes the teams created. We were unable to gain access to their ‘secret sauce’ as it were, maybe their recipes were being kept as trade secrets?

Trade Secrets

Trade secrets are one of the oldest known forms of protecting your IP. In the UK, trade secret protection is provided for by Directive (EU) 2016/943[2]. Information held by a company or a person is considered to be a trade secret if it meets the following criteria[3]. 1) It is a secret, i.e. it is information only known by a limited number of people in the company; 2) it has commercial value because it is a secret, and 3) reasonable steps have been taken by the holder of the information to keep it a secret.

By reasonable steps, this means ensuring that the secret information is properly documented and that access to said information is controlled. For example, the information is password-protected, and a list of people who have the password or access to the information is kept and stored. If one of these people leaves the company, then steps must be taken to update the access control to the information.

There is no official registration for trade secrets and no limited term of protection either; in other words, trade secret protection lasts indefinitely. However, once the information being kept as a trade secret is disclosed (either accidentally or against your wishes), the protection is lost. Furthermore, trade secrets do not protect against third parties independently developing the innovation or secret information themselves and seeking to protect said information in a more formal way. For example, if you keep an innovation as a trade secret and someone else independently develops the same innovation, obtaining a patent for it, you will no longer be able to use the innovation yourself.

There are some famous trade secrets in the food and drinks industry. For example, the formula for the Coca-Cola syrup is a trade secret belonging to the Coca-Cola company. This formula has supposedly been kept as a trade secret since 1891[4]. Another famous example comes from the fast food chain KFC. The original recipe of Saunder’s for the mix of eleven herbs and spices is also supposedly a trade secret[5]. However, there are doubts over whether this claim is valid or whether it is merely a marketing ploy.

Outside of food and drinks, for technology and software-based companies, it is always worth weighing up the pros and cons of keeping an innovation as a trade secret or filing a patent application. For example, for software platforms, there may be different elements which merit patent protection, but others which are better kept as a trade secret. Typically, a pragmatic approach should be taken, where patent applications are filed for the externally visible, technically characterised mechanisms which are likely to be detected by third parties when the product is sold or used, whilst keeping the remaining mechanisms and features as trade secrets.

Next time

Next week, it looks like the contestants will have a branding task. So I predict next week’s blog will be on trade marks! Stay tuned….

 

 

[1] Just a side note, unrelated to IP, but my boyfriend also doesn’t like cheese. As for myself, I am a cheese lover, and when my boyfriend first told me he didn’t like cheese I actually cried. True story.

[2] It should be noted that the trade secret protection offered by the EU directive has already been implemented into UK law (Trade Secrets (Enforcement, etc.) Regulations 2018/897) and therefore is, in effect, not impacted by Brexit.

[3] https://www.wipo.int/en/web/trade-secrets

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KFC_Original_Recipe

 

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