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Bellhop
The "sandwich" in question is actually on the market and, as far as I know, no ...
bnowak
Old Timer, as your name suggests you might be unfamiliar with this whole ...
What were they thinking: A crazy patent makes money
Brian Bailey
1/18/2013 11:26 AM EST
Many times on Fridays, I look at a crazy patent that makes us scratch our heads and wonder how on earth the inventor ever thought he/she or anyone else could make money off of their invention. Maybe they just did it for the fame instead of the fortune. Then there are other times when it just seems crazy that a patent would have been issued when it did – when it seemed as if everyone was already doing it. Well today’s patent falls into that category and it was not only granted, it was bought by a large corporation who then made a product line out of it.
The patent in question is simply titled “Sealed crustless sandwich”, was filed in 1997, issued in 1999 and was bought by Smuckers in 1998. The abstract reads:
A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings therebetween. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.
So, we have a sealed PBJ sandwich without the crusts and Smuckers started making a line of products called Uncrustables shortly after acquiring the patent and is still doing so today. I wonder how much he sold it for?
Brian Bailey – keeping you entertained
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Doug S
1/18/2013 1:34 PM EST
How is this patentable? It is just an idea, and I thought ideas could not be patented. Not to mention the "prior art" from millions of kids who for decades have been pulling/cutting the crusts off their sandwich and pressing together all around the edge with their thumbs.
Great example of how broken our patent system is.
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bnowak
1/18/2013 4:28 PM EST
Ideas can very much be patented, and you’re mistaking 'prior art' with ‘non-obviousness’.
A great example of how broken your knowledge of the patent system is.
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BrianBailey
1/19/2013 1:38 PM EST
Lets all be nice now. This was a regular patent so both prior art and obviousness applied.
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WKetel
1/18/2013 8:39 PM EST
This may be a "design patent", which I have found is different from a real patent. But here, as always, the magic is in the claims. Peanut butter on both sides is unusual, and probably not "obvious to anyone in the art", and so it can be covered. But other than that, they do look a whole lot like the sandwiches my Canadian friends used to cook over a campfire. I think that they were called "Pudgy Pies." That was long before 1996. So it seems that some uses of the design may be protected by being grandfathered. Of course, we never attempted to keep them for extended periods of time, but rather only till they cooled enough to eat.
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BrianBailey
1/19/2013 1:38 PM EST
This is a regular patent and not a design patent, so the patent office thought that a) there was no prior are and b) it was non obvious.
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Andy_I
1/19/2013 12:08 PM EST
Peanut butter on both sides is something I had been doing decades ago. I didn't think it was so unusual. It helps keep the jelly from bleeding through the bread, useful for sandwiches made at breakfast time but not eaten until later in the day.
Cutting off the crust, well that wasn't something I used to do (for sandwiches I ate) because I liked some crust. But I did trim the crust for others.
So here we have a patent that combines two (or more) practices that have been around for ages. Is that what makes it new, the idea of combining things into the same sandwich?
Did the patent elaborate on whether it was white or wheat bread? Hmmm.
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BrianBailey
1/19/2013 1:37 PM EST
No, it did not make that distinction.
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Battar
1/20/2013 2:07 AM EST
The question of non-obviousness is subjective. It is assumed that a patent must be non-obvious to someone "ordinarily skilled in the art", which means people normally employed in the field, not experienced engineers who would come up with the same solution. In the case of sandwiches "ordinarily skilled in the art" would be any hungry 8-year old, so the patent application should have been deemed obvious. The examiner probably restricted his prior art search to previous patents. If the examiner had also turned to back issues of "Good housekeeping", I'm pretty sure he would have found something.
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Duane Benson
1/21/2013 12:23 PM EST
"The examiner probably restricted his prior art search to previous patents" Prior art searches are not supposed to be limited to previous patents. It certainly is possible that the examiner did that, but my understanding is that doing so would not be adequate.
Of course, maybe it's so obvious to most people that it's never been written down and the patent examiner just happened to have been raised on cheese sandwiches instead of peanut butter and jelly.
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Old Timer
1/21/2013 2:16 AM EST
We have not seen enough of the patent to even know what is patented. Everything in a patent leading up to the claims is just fluff. Until you read the claims (and only the independent ones really matter) you realy cannot tell what the patent actually protects.
In the future it would be helpfull to our understanding if the patent number would be included in the article. That way we could easily read the whole patent for educational value.
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Battar
1/21/2013 9:29 AM EST
Thats US patent 6004596, and the legalistic language used to describe a sandwich is hilarious. (Perimiter coplaner to surface... edible filling juxtaposed...). The claim says, make a sandwich, remove the crust, crimp the edge so the PB doesn't squeeze out. The USPTO shouldn't grant patents for such rubbish.
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BrianBailey
1/21/2013 11:04 AM EST
Thanks @Battar for supplying the number - I usually do, but failed to on this one. My mistake.
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bnowak
1/21/2013 1:36 PM EST
Old Timer, as your name suggests you might be unfamiliar with this whole 'internet thing'. See, we have this tool called google. Your generation might call it a voodoo magic machine, mine calls it a search engine.
Just plug in any one of the sentences that Brian supplied you with from the abstract into this voodoo machine, and presto, you have the patent staring you right in the face.
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Bellhop
1/24/2013 4:16 PM EST
The "sandwich" in question is actually on the market and, as far as I know, no one is making a knockoff.
http://www.smuckers.com/products/group.aspx?groupId=3
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