I guess if they get the patent then Burger King can’t give you their’s “your way” because that would infringe on the process.
McDonald’s puts patent on sandwiches
McDonald’s wants to own the rights to how a sandwich is made.
The fast-food chain has applied for a patent relating to the ‘method and apparatus’ used to prepare the snack.
The burger company says owning the ‘intellectual property rights’ would help its hot deli sandwiches look and taste the same at all of its restaurants.
It also wants to cut down on the time needed to put together a sandwich, thought to have been dreamt up by the Earl of Sandwich in 1762.
The 55-page patent, which has been filed in the US and Europe, covers the ‘simultaneous toasting of a bread component’.
Garnishes of lettuce, onions and tomatoes, as well as salt, pepper and ketchup, are inserted into a cavity in a ‘sandwich delivery tool’.
The ‘bread component’ is placed over the cavity and the assembly tool is inverted to tip out the contents. Finally, the filling is placed in the ‘bread component’.
It explains: ‘Often the sandwich filling is the source of the name of the sandwich; for example, ham sandwich.’
Lawrence Smith-Higgins, of the UK Patent Office, said: ‘McDonald’s or anyone else cannot get retrospective exclusive rights to making a sandwich.
‘They might have a novel device, but it could be quite easy for someone to make a sandwich in a similar way without infringing their claims.’
McDonald’s said: ‘These applications are not intended to prevent anyone from using previous methods for making sandwiches.’
Everyone is blaming the lawyers when it is obviously those who are hiring them that are the problem.
Reminds me of an item I read years ago where a fellow received a patent for handles on a wheelbarrow and managed, for a time anyway, to patent the entire wheelbarrow.
RBG
“help its hot deli sandwiches look and taste the same at all of its restaurants”
They already do. McDonald’s sandwiches always taste like cardboard .
Ahhh…I thought you cannot patent a business process…
Isn’t the method of making a sandwich a business process…?
This is pretty dumb…
#21 – Alex – If you wanna waste your time and actually read the article, just so you can be “informed” and “educated” then you go right ahead.
The rest of us are just fine to wallow in biased conjecture and unfounded accusation.
All the damn lawyers need to die!
Have the patent lawyers gone mad!
To quote an early poster…I too look forward to a new congress…but it’s just more of the same shit, different party, not a bloody thing will change until a third party comes to minority power…which I fear is another 6 years off, by then we’ll be off the deep end and learning Mandarin.
99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
— Steven Wright
There is loads of information out there exposing the ingredients in McDonald’s to be toxic and very bad for your health. Fatuous nonsense. And typical of the way the word “toxic” is misused by the ignorant and the scaremongering. McDonalds food is not unhealthy – consuming calories and fat to excess, regardless of what fast food restaurant prepared it, is unhealthy. And McDonalds’ food is not toxic, by any rational English-speaker’s definition of the word “toxic”.