Is It Allowed To Be Finger Lickin’?

In this article we take a look at a small area of Manchester that has cornered the market for spicy chicken, and how having the secret of the sauce can come at a price.

AUTHOR

Ben Prangell

What could get Ben to write “Oooo this one has got me excited….” ?

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that it was another food-related IP case we recently came across.

This one was filed in the IPEC on 8 July: Ezel and another v California Crispy Chicken Ltd and another, IP-2026-000089.

The claimants are Mourad Ezel and Miami Crispy Franchise Ltd. The defendants, California Crispy Chicken Ltd and Safa Majid Mohammad, are recorded as litigants in person.

This isn’t a US brand dispute, as some have speculated, but, at least on one side, a Manchester institution. This gives us an opportunity to shine a light on a pretty mad food scene that Ben often waxes lyrical about: Manchester’s spicy dipped chicken burgers.

If you haven’t read Jack Dulhanty and Sophie Atkinson’s piece for The Mill, you can enlighten yourself here. The busiest takeaways in the area may be turning over £45,000 a week, with rumoured offers of £100,000-£150,000 for a sauce recipe. At the centre of it is a dipping sauce whose recipe is so closely guarded that, reportedly, those who know it won’t even share it with their wives or mothers.

Allegedly every sauce in the city descends from one “mother sauce” made at Kansas Fried Chicken in the 90s by a man known only as Doctor (what a legend). He reportedly died around 2010, and the recipe passed to his staff, who left, opened their own shops, and let it mutate.

One insider’s description beats any textbook explanation of how trade secrets can leak: shops don’t buy recipes, they buy staff, like footy transfers. “Recipes don’t get sold, they get moved.”

Which makes this an IP problem.

A patent can provide protection for up to twenty years, but in return you have to publicly disclose what you’re protecting. That’s not particularly appealing when the value of a secret recipe lies in nobody knowing what’s in it. There’s no copyright in a recipe, either (other than potentially a literary work in how it is expressed). So, a six-figure asset may instead sit within the law of confidence, alongside the Trade Secrets Regulations 2018, with protection depending on reasonable steps to keep it secret.

Coca-Cola and KFC run this way. A takeaway trying to do the same with no paperwork may struggle.

Protection also gets thin the moment someone walks out of the door.

The case on this is Faccenda Chicken Ltd v Fowler. Once employment ends, only genuine trade secrets survive as implied obligations. Ordinary know-how does not, absent an express covenant. So, if recipes move because a fryer moves, whether you have anything to sue over depends on what his contract said before he left.

The brand side is also tough. Miami Crispy, California Crispy, Kansas Fried Chicken, Philadelphia’s: American place name plus a descriptor is common around Manchester (and further afield).

IPEC will be well suited to this dispute, offering a streamlined procedure and capped recoverable costs designed to keep the action proportionate.

We’ll definitely be following this one and it will be interesting to see the grounds for the dispute and, perhaps, whether Manchester’s closely guarded chicken secrets end up getting an airing in court.

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