Many years ago when my ex (before he was my ex) was stationed in Atlanta, Georgia, I made many visits there. Atlanta also happens to be the “home” of Coca-Cola, my favorite soft drink, so I couldn’t resist a trip to the Coca-Cola Museum. There was a gift shop, of course, and you could watch the assembly line in process. The docent gave a great talk on Coca-Cola’s history and answered our questions.

Except for one.

Someone in the group (Not me, though that’s surprising.) asked if it were true that Coca-Cola’s formula is a closely guarded secret. I never saw a docent grow so serious so fast. I was certain she was about to call Coca-Cola’s equivalent of the Secret Service to take us all in for questioning.

I thought it was an urban myth that Coca-Cola’s formula was kept under lock and key. Obviously not, but I remembered that incident after researching topics to write about this week. Lo and behold, I discovered the world of culinary espionage.

Culinary Espionage

Having had friends who are chefs, I know that recipes are closely guarded. What I didn’t know was the extent to which someone would try to steal the recipes and the methods used to create them. Talk about spycraft! Indeed, chefs learn a version of culinary counterintelligence to safeguard recipes.

In a podcast episode several weeks ago, I talked about economic espionage aka corporate espionage, and certainly, culinary espionage is an aspect of that. However, I couldn’t quite see the stakes (no pun intended) involved in culinary espionage. So what if someone found out what Col. Sanders’ combination of spices was? Or what was in McDonalds’ quarter-pounder sauce?

Well, a monetary loss above all. If people knew what was in certain culinary delights, they’d make them at home, and grocery stores would get the business that KFC and McDonalds would have had.

Even in my own family, my father had a recipe in his head for making pork sausage from freshly slaughtered pigs. He made it in a building somewhere on the farm, and he took the recipe to his grave. I haven’t found anything since that tastes as good as that, and I’ve never been able to recreate it through experimentation.

However, there is a trend nowadays where people are having treasured family recipes engraved on their headstones.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll write a story about food spies in the graveyard.

A Brief History

Throughout history, food or the withholding thereof has been a weapon, a bargaining chip, and a closely guarded secret. The cuisine of Ancient Rome was renown across its empire, and there are instances where rival empires sent food spies to find the secrets of creating such cuisine, as well as techniques for preserving food, which the Romans had developed.

In the Middle Ages, monks not only produced incredible wines, ales, and cheeses, they experimented continually with recipes to improve their products–and guarded those recipes from rival monasteries, kings, and queens. Key to their success was the monks’ agricultural knowledge of how to grow the ingredients for their products, and they kept that secret, too.

When Europeans moved across the globe to the far east and the Americas, spice became a key ingredient certain countries wanted to control. Spice routes from Asia through the middle east to Europe were sometimes closely guarded secrets but still were often attacked for the spices they carried. How would raiders know these secret routes? Why, food spies, of course.

The American Civil War included battles to obtain agricultural products to feed both armies. Intelligence on where to find food supplies, crops, and livestock was essential to World War II victories. The fact that Hitler was a vegetarian was considered a German state secret. Sabotage of food supplies, discovered by covert operations, was a critical tactic. Or in some instances, as in parts of Ukraine in World War II, livestock was slaughtered and left to rot and food crops were burned–called scorched earth–to keep the Germans from using them.

Today, many recipes are considered proprietary to whatever establishment uses them, as are production methods of crops, and there are the secrets around genetic modification of crops (which, by the way, has gone on for centuries and isn’t a modern phenomenon).

Food Spycraft

Much as with corporate espionage, culinary espionage uses what we’d recognize as traditional tradecraft: infiltration, bribery, blackmail, surveillance, etc. One of the most common techniques is for a chef to obtain a low-level job in a rival restaurant. That way, the infiltrator would not only have access to secret recipes, he or she could gather intel on the restaurant’s favorite dishes and how they’re made. Mobile phones can take discreet photographs of prep techniques as well as recipes.

Why another chef as an infiltrator? The infiltrator has to have a good knowledge of innumerable ingredients and what happens when you combine them. Quite often, the infiltrator can deconstruct a recipe simply by tasting a dish, which chefs are known to do with kitchen staff. Infiltrators have been known to use Q-like gadgets in their undercover work: miniature spectrometers to analyze what’s in a dish and in what proportions.

Infiltrators have gained access to secure areas of restaurants, i.e., where the recipes are hidden by having others infiltrate as patrons who make a fuss or get into a fight, pull a fire alarm, anything to distract the kitchen staff. Like any spy on a black bag job, the food spy would have to act quickly before the distraction dies down. Definitely could be a tense scene in a book or movie.

Restaurants also build a cadre of informants from all over the food industry, recruiting them much as a counterintelligence operative amasses his or her agents. Again, you might say, what’s the big deal if Restaurant B learns Restaurant A’s secret recipes? After all, there are no secrets here that would damage national security. However, it could destroy a business and result in loss of jobs.

Restaurants also suffer from the same type of informant as the intelligence world does–the disgruntled employee seeking revenge who manages to smuggle out a key recipe and offers it for sale to a rival restaurant.

When restaurants have sued other restaurants for stealing recipes, it has sometimes been difficult to prove any damages or that the recipe was proprietary. But it has led to discussion about creativity and intellectual property in the culinary arts.

Because of the increase in this type of corporate espionage, restaurants now safeguard their recipes like Fort Knox, so Coca-Cola wasn’t so odd after all.

The Impact

Again, the impact of culinary espionage is mostly economic, with rival restaurants cutting into the business of other restaurants. Innovation and uniqueness drive the food industry, with chefs trying to outdo each other in delivering uncommon combinations and flavors.

And when a recipe is stolen by a competitor, that forces the original developer to take the time and money to create something new and even more unique. Business can suffer in the interim.

Interestingly enough, the hardest hit by food espionage are small food businesses and start-up restaurants. Most times, until they develop a following and a customer base, they don’t have the resources to protect their creations. When larger establishments steal from them, small start-ups lose the competitive edge that may have given them initial success.

Because copyright and patent laws are sometimes difficult to apply to food and/or recipes, the food industry has made security a top priority. Restaurants now use encrypted digital recipes and non-disclosure agreements for employees. This is another cut into the restaurant’s bottom line, all tied back to culinary espionage.

Other food espionage countermeasures, also expensive, include redesigning kitchens to limit visibility from restaurant patrons. Why bother to infiltrate when you can sit at a table and take selfies and happen to document preparation of a dish? Ingredients may be placed in unlabeled containers and put in a specific order on a shelf or in a pantry. (Yeah, what could go wrong there?) A chef may enter a “secure room” to accomplish the key production steps in a recipe.

At the even higher end of protective means are things like biometric access to pantries or prep rooms, closed circuit TV surveillance of every part of the kitchen and prep areas, and anomaly detection systems. Extreme, yes, but again in an industry where a single recipe may make or break a business’s reputation, such tactics may pay for themselves. Eventually.

The Future of Culinary Secrets

As the world becomes more interconnected, something that’s inescapable, culinary secrets will become more unique but their security will also become even more uncertain. Think of it as the “democratization” of culinary knowledge, something that can spark even more creativity. We see that now in fusion cuisine.

Food spies will continue to do their dubious work in this interconnected world until we can strike a balance between sharing knowledge while maintaining a business edge.

As something of a foodie, I’m looking forward to that. I am, however, one of those cooks who makes a recipe up as I go along. I’ll happily share the ingredient list, but even I don’t know the amounts I use. Everything for me is “to taste.”

Maybe that’s the ultimate culinary security.