Pushkin.

This is an I-Heart podcast.

A while ago, my colleague, Ben Didaff Halfrey and I gathered to eat English muffins at the Pushkin office.

Ben had the idea to do a story about the famous secret recipe for Thomas's English muffins.

It sounded like a fun romp. Go for it, I said. Have a good time. Enjoy yourself.

And then, a couple months down the road, Ben recorded the following voice memo.

It's 5.16 a.m. I just had a dream where I was in an Airbnb with someone who was

affiliated with Bimbo Bakeries, who knew I was trying to reverse engineer the muffin recipe.

He's this bald guy with a mustache.

I want to say he was wearing like a cardigan.

We were playing pool in this Airbnb, and he said,

how much flour and how much water do you think we start with?

Because if you tell me that, it'll tell me if you're even close to knowing how we do this.

It was clear that Ben had gone very deep into the nooks and crannies of this story.

But this work was too important to stop.

In case you missed our previous episode, let me catch you up. One of the most famous trade secrets

of all time is the recipe for Thomas's English muffins. It involves how they create their

famous nooks and crannies, the most distinctive feature of a nearly

half a billion dollar product. The owner of Thomas's Bimbo Bakery's Grupo Bimbo, say this secret

was allegedly known to only seven employees at the company, and they sued one of them

to keep him from taking another job, which set off a whole race in corporate America

to lock up as many trade secrets as possible.

...