To me, the most interesting part of this article was the quest to obtain the frozen fries in the first place. I'm amazed a McDonald's manager gave them out.
Corporations like McDonald's rely on trade secrets: things that can't necessarily be patented, or which might be placed in danger by being patented. (Applying for a patent makes a recipe public record, and the lifetime of the patent is finite.) The secret recipe for Coke, or in this case the secrets behind McD's fries, are worth billions of dollars.
For all the McD's manager knew, Grant might have been a rival doing some corporate espionage. Or he might have been a government inspector of some sort. It sounds farfetched. But many people in store management in retail and fast food are very aware of these possibilities, and they're trained to err on the side of extreme caution.
Kenji isn't lying when he says the employee/manager in question could get fired for having given these out. Trade secrets in multi-billion-dollar corporations are a fascinating subject: they're often tied to the most seemingly minute details, and they're guarded as carefully as gold.
I doubt McDonalds really cares that much about their trade secrets.
Even though I love McDonalds fries (you can almost taste the oppression and cultural hegemony), perfectly emulating McDonald's fries is always going to be a tiny niche. No competitor is going to want their fries to be exactly the same as in McDonalds since brands want to position themselves as interesting and unique.
That said, I don't really like the deception he (and his agents) practiced, but it seems like a minor sin in the scheme of things.
They have about $1.7 billion in intangible assets on their balance sheet, of which trade secrets are not necessarily delineated but are a significant component.
I have no real idea if the fries are a trade secret; that much is pure speculation. But my point was more that I wouldn't be surprised if the fries were a trade secret, as such is the norm for large food companies. You'd be surprised at the level of granularity involved in food company trade secrets. It's not so much about protecting the quality of McDonald's fries; it's about protecting the properties of those fries that permit logistics at McDonalds-level scale: fries that are designed a certain way as to always cook consistently despite freezing, transportation across complex supply lines, inconsistent on-site storage and preparation, etc. It's not a huge stretch to call McD's fries a product of engineering as much as nature.
Corporations like McDonald's rely on trade secrets: things that can't necessarily be patented, or which might be placed in danger by being patented. (Applying for a patent makes a recipe public record, and the lifetime of the patent is finite.) The secret recipe for Coke, or in this case the secrets behind McD's fries, are worth billions of dollars.
For all the McD's manager knew, Grant might have been a rival doing some corporate espionage. Or he might have been a government inspector of some sort. It sounds farfetched. But many people in store management in retail and fast food are very aware of these possibilities, and they're trained to err on the side of extreme caution.
Kenji isn't lying when he says the employee/manager in question could get fired for having given these out. Trade secrets in multi-billion-dollar corporations are a fascinating subject: they're often tied to the most seemingly minute details, and they're guarded as carefully as gold.