Ben-Nadav Hafri
speaker
333 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Ben-Nadav Hafri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
A muffin is a muffin. Hearing Chris say this a couple months ago would have saved me a lot of time.
can see it so it's not a secured formula formula that they keep secret you know in a bowl somewhere it's it's left on the floor it's really not anybody knows the formula bimbo bakeries hadn't replied to repeated requests for comment by the time we recorded this episode but by now i could believe this secret recipe was all nonsense But the best secrets bring us together.
They bind us like a monastic order. They don't trap us. I suspect that even if someone got into that monastery and stole the full recipe for chartreuse, people would still rather get a bottle of it from the monks themselves. Because the secret means something coming from them, tied, as it is, to an even greater mystery.
That's why Bimbo's still pretending these are Samuel Thomas' English muffins a century after his death. But these Thomas' nooks and crannies? Now they're just a bit of marketing. A myth that somehow became a legal standard. Anyways, the best way to protect your nooks and crannies isn't a trade secret. It's opening your muffins with a fork. A knife just ruins the whole thing.
So you give your kids sugar, but you just keep them very cold.
So, yeah, yeah.
Special thanks to Chelsea Burgess, Jonathan Frishtick, Susan Reed, William Woys Weaver, Corey Theodore at the Anti-Conquest Baking Company, Becky Cooper for introducing me to chartreuse, Julia Conrad, Robin Dando, and Jonathan A. Zierfoss for helping us with our triangle test methodology, and all the students at the CIA. Happy graduation. I'm Ben Mattafafry.
It like hits the back of your palate. There's like a funk to it. You know what I mean?
It does have that kind of like Proustian association thing. Like it tastes like, I remember this taste. Yes. When I have this, it does take me back. Like I am seeing my family's kitchen where we would eat breakfast in like the big spread. Yeah.
And for that reason, it is nearly a half a billion dollar a year in sales product. It is the sine qua non of bread products, baked goods. Yeah. The champ. Undisputed.
Here's Ben. I once hired a lawyer who dreams about suing people. He told me this on a call once. I asked for proof. And he showed me a video of himself asleep, very clearly muttering, I'll sue you. And something to the effect of, you're going to jail. There were some swears in there too. My first thought was, this man is the best lawyer I'll ever have. Second thought, I better pay him quickly.
We were going over an employment contract. We got to the part about intellectual property, and I thought the degree to which an employer could punish you if you ever divulged one of their trade secrets seemed a little crazy. To which my lawyer replied, well, it's nooks and crannies. And even recognizing I was paying by the second, I was like, what did you just say?
The key to English muffin supremacy comes down to the balance of nooks, which catch and pool the melted butter, and the thin, crisp walls of the crannies. But somehow, nooks and crannies are now lawyer shorthand for trade secret. Why?
In 1876, a baker named Samuel Bath Thomas left England for the United States. Little's known about his life before he lands in New York, but he arrived with a recipe in his pocket for what typically would be called Welsh muffins or crumpets. He cooked them on a griddle so they'd be crisp on the outside and doughy yet pockmarked in the inside in a way few other breads were.
Thomas's nooks and crannies took New York by storm. Demand skyrocketed. He opened another bakery. Then it became a corporation. Eventually, the words Nooks and Crannies became a registered trademark of Thomas's English muffins. You will note if you look at the bakery shelves at your local grocery store that other English muffin brands live in fear of this fact.
Dave's Killer Bread boasts of butter-catching flavor craters. Trader Joe's has pockets and crevices. Bay's has raised the white flag and left the field entirely with a claim about packaging, now resealable. Because all of them know better than to cross the entity that now owns Thomas'. Grupo Bimbo.
Grupo Bimbo, international baking conglomerate.
Bimbo is everywhere. They've taken over half the bread brands you've heard of and 50% of the rest. They've swept through the U.S., acquiring one bakery after another.
No one stands in the way of Grupo Bimbo. And in 2009, at the height of their powers, they acquired the holy grail of baked goods, the Nooks and Crannies.
The secret recipe for nooks and crannies brought in about half a billion dollars in annual revenue to Grupo Bimbo. But then, according to Bimbo, someone tried to steal it. Can you just tell me the basic facts of the case? Well, in this case, I guess we can go through it.
Showing 81–100 of 333 · page 5 of 17
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