Trade Secrecy in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory
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Description
Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is well-known as a dark fantasy in which five children win a visit to a whimsical candy company. Less conspicuous is the legal issue of trade secrecy driving the novel’s plot. Secrecy is not indigenous to fictional representations of the candy industry, but is widespread throughout its real- world confectionary counterparts of today and yesteryear. An investigation of the need for secrecy in this commercial sphere raises fundamental questions about the role of legal protection for misappropriations of secrets when actual secrecy seems to be paramount and about the relationship between trade secrecy and patent law. Dahl’s story depicts Willy Wonka as an extraordinary innovator of candies. Early in the story, the novel’s title character, Charlie Bucket, receives a mere taste of some of Wonka’s many creations from the descriptions of Grandpa Joe, Charlie’s grandfather, of ‘a way of making chocolate ice cream so that it stays cold for hours and hours without being in the icebox’, ‘marshmallows that taste of violets, . . . rich caramels that change colour every ten seconds as you suck them, . . . chewing gum that never loses its taste, and candy balloons that you can blow up to enormous sizes before you pop them with a pin and gobble them up’. In his depictions, Grandpa Joe is careful to stress that many of Wonka’s methods for producing his candies are ‘most secret’ to protect his ideas from appropriation by others. In fact, Wonka’s methods and his perpetual stream of product ideas are so coveted that three of his competitors, Fickelgruber, Prodnose and Slugworth, have tried to steal these ideas. As Grandpa Joe tells it: ‘All the other chocolate makers, you see, had begun to grow jealous of the wonderful candies that Mr. Wonka was making, and they started sending in spies to steal his secret recipes. The spies took jobs in the Wonka factory, pretending that they were ordinary workers, and while they were there, each one of them found out exactly how a certain special thing was made.’ The spying has been successful, as: ‘soon after th[e spying], Fickelgruber’s factory started making an ice cream that would never melt, even in the hottest sun. Then Mr. Prodnose’s factory came out with a chewing gum that never lost its flavour however much you chewed it. And then Mr. Slugworth’s factory began making candy balloons that you could blow up to huge sizes before you popped them with a pin and gobbled them up.’ Unsurprisingly, Willy Wonka grew frustrated and feared financial ruin were his competitors to persevere in the thievery of his ideas. As things stood, he would be investing his resources and energy to produce new types of candies and novel ways of making them, while his competitors would be reaping a good deal of his creativity’s sweet rewards, so to speak. Not content with that result, Wonka opted to cease all operations at his chocolate factory, by firing all of his employees, ‘shut[ting] the main gates and fasten[ing] them with a chain’, and stopping the factory’s machines and chimneys. With no chocolates or candies being made, Wonka disap- peared from sight for months. While Wonka was not applying his creative talents to making chocolate, he was using them to find a solution to his competitors’ stealing. He located a tribe of Oompa- Loompas, tiny song-loving people from Loompaland. The Oompa-Loompas loved cacao beans, a prime ingredient for chocolate, but hardly any of the beans were available in Loompaland. Willy Wonka was therefore easily able to convince them to leave the dangerous jungles of Loompaland and come and live in his candy land of a factory, working for him there in exchange for an unlimited supply of cacao beans and chocolate. With the immigration of the Oompa-Loompas, Wonka was able to reopen his chocolate factory. He had found a way to get distinctive-looking laborers who would not leave the factory, which protected him in two ways from divulgence of information about his candy-making processes and products. First, as the Oompa-Loompas would be living at the factory and without access to outsiders, there would be little to no chance for them to reveal Wonka’s sweet nothings to his competitors. Second, because Wonka would not be letting in any employees other than the Oompa-Loompas and because they had a unique look, it had become exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, for Wonka’s competitors to sneak spies into the factory under the guise of employment.
Source Publication
The Law and Theory of Trade Secrecy: A Handbook of Contemporary Research
Source Editors/Authors
Rochelle C. Dreyfuss, Katherine J. Strandburg
Publication Date
2011
Recommended Citation
Fromer, Jeanne C., "Trade Secrecy in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory" (2011). Faculty Chapters. 644.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/644
