Type | Sandwich |
---|---|
Course | Lunch, Snack |
Place of origin | United States |
Main ingredients | Bread, various fillings |
A sealed crustless sandwich consists of a filling between two layers of crimp-sealed bread, with the crust removed.
Homemade variations are typically square, round, or triangular; the bread can vary, e.g., white or whole wheat; and the sandwiches can be homemade with common crimping techniques similar to pie crust, ravioli, or dumplings using readily available kitchen tools (e.g., a fork, small spoon or curved knife end to crimp the edges). A purpose-designed "cut and crimp" tool can also be used. [1]
Mass-produced varieties vary in shape, are typically individually wrapped, frozen and packaged — and include proprietary brands as well as house brands. They were introduced in 1995 with peanut butter and jelly filling, followed by numerous patent [2] and trademark disputes as well as numerous competitors entering the market.
The sandwiches offer easily-frozen and thawed, ready-to-eat, portable convenience and have been called, "the Swiss Army knife of foods". [3]
Originally developed for as a prepared food for school lunches, [4] they have appeal across generations and can easily be included in a homemade lunch. In 2018, sealed crustless sandwiches were made available to firemen during the California wildfires. [5] [6] National Football League teams buy tens of thousands of them for players to eat as snacks. [4]
In the United States, mass-produced crustless sealed sandwiches were introduced in 1995, in Fargo, North Dakota by David Geske and Len Kretchman [7] — at the time marketing as Incredible Uncrustables to schools in the Midwest, with fifty employees making roughly 35,000 of the sealed sandwiches daily by 1998. [7] Their company was purchased by The J.M. Smucker Company in 1998. [7] In Japan, Yamazaki Baking has marketed Lunch Pack sealed sandwiches since 1984.
Companies have marketed sealed crustless sandwiches in square, triangular, round and even cloud shapes — with an extensive range of fillings, including ham, [8] cheese, [8] chocolate-hazelnut spread, [8] almond butter and jam, [9] peanut butter and honey, [8] peanut butter and apple butter, peanut butter and banana, sunflower butter and jelly — or, prominently, peanut butter and jelly. [8] In the case of the latter, some companies apply the peanut butter to both interior surfaces of the bread, shielding the bread from the jelly — engineer the bread to prevent filling leaks [10] or augment the crimping with starch to provide a tighter seal.
Mass-produced U.S. brands include:
Smuckers has plants in Kentucky [11] Colorado [12] and Alabama [13] with Uncrustables sales projected at $500 million in 2021 — offering numerous variations, e.g., Grilled Cheese Uncrustable (approximately 2003-2014), Ham and Cheddar Bites,Pepperoni Bites and others. In 2023, Smucker said it took about ten years to prevent "leaky sandwiches," designing the bread so it doesn't create air pockets and using round loaves. [10]
Chubby Snacks, headquartered in Colorado, [14] launched as a direct-to-consumer brand in 2020. It markets its sealed sandwiches in a "cloud" shape [15] using organic, whole wheat bread; medjool dates and monk fruit for sweetness rather than refined sugar, and having 2-3 grams of sugar per sandwich. [16] The company aimed to manufacture 30 million sealed crustless sandwiches annually by 2024. [17]
Smuckers, with $7.8 billion in net sales as of 2020, has issued cease and desist letters to any company marketing crustless sealed sandwiches in a round shape, including small businesses, arguing trademark infringement. Targeted companies have included Chubby Snacks, [7] which revised their sandwiches to a cloud shape; Albie's Foods [7] which revised their EZ Jammers to a triangular and later square shape, and Gallant Tiger [18] which markets a decidedly adult-flavored product (e.g., chai spiced pear butter and peanut butter) selling at a price-point roughly six times the cost of an Uncrustable.
The Gallant Tiger founder noted that at a time when the company had seven sales outlets, "1,000 followers on Instagram and $20,000 in sales, and [Smuckers was] telling us that not only are we infringing on their trademark, which is a circle-shaped sandwich, but we also were falsifying advertising and essentially slandering them. It was weird. It was almost like in the eyes of Smucker, [Gallant Tiger] was a criminal," adding that a consumer "can tell the difference between Domino's and Pizza Hut [pizza] even though they're both circular food products. So what are we really talking about here?" [18]
The United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a number of patents for mass-produced versions of a sealed crustless sandwich, which were subsequently reexamined and cancelled for having attempted to patent obvious or well known concepts.
The first claim of Menusaver's patent reads:
That is, the patent described a sandwich with a layer of filling in between two pieces of bread which are crimped shut and have their crust removed. The other nine claims of the patent elaborate the idea further, including the coating of two sides of the bread with peanut butter first before putting the jelly in the middle, so that the jelly would not seep into the bread—the layers of filling "are engaged to one another to form a reservoir for retaining the second filling in between".
Many intellectual property experts and members of the general public view this patent as an example of the patent office's inability to properly examine patent applications. [19] The patent examiner cited only seven previous patents issued between 1963 and 1998, and a 1994 book called 50 Great Sandwiches that were deemed relevant to the novelty and nonobviousness of the invention. He concluded that the invention was indeed novel and not obvious and allowed the claims. [19]
Since then, many more earlier patents and publications have been found that teach some or all of the different aspects of the invention. These include a 1949 patent ( U.S. patent 2,463,439 ) that describes a device to create these types of sandwiches: "An object of this invention is to provide... a means for locating said filling in the center of the sandwich and sealing the marginal edges of the pieces by heat and pressure to preclude the escape of filling from the finished product... [and] a means for trimming the baked dough pieces". These new pieces of prior art have been brought to the attention of the patent office through a reexamination proceeding. (See below)
The J.M. Smucker Co. also attempted to patent the process of making the sandwich in 2004 (rather than just the sandwich itself) and on April 8, 2005, had its application rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC)..
In 2001, a small grocery and caterer in Gaylord, Michigan, Albie's Food, Inc., was sent a cease and desist letter from The J.M. Smucker Co., accusing Albie's of violating their intellectual property rights to the "sealed crustless sandwich". Instead of capitulating, Albie's took the case to federal court, noting in their filings a pocket sandwich with crimped edges and no crust was called a "pasty" and had been a popular dish in northern Michigan since the nineteenth century. Federal Court determined that Albie's Foods did not infringe on J.M. Smucker Co. intellectual property rights and was allowed to continue. [20]
In March 2001, during the legal proceedings, Albie's filed a request for reexamination with the USPTO asking that the patent be reexamined in light of the new prior art. The reexamination serial number is 90/005,949.
In response to the new prior art cited, Smucker's narrowed the wording of their claims to only cover a very specific version of their sealed crustless sandwich. The more narrow claims, for example, only cover sealed crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches where the jelly is held between two layers of peanut butter. Nonetheless, in December 2003, the patent examiner rejected the narrowed claims in light of the new prior art.
Smucker's appealed the rejection to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI). In September 2006, the BPAI reversed the examiner's reasons for rejecting the claims, but found new reasons for rejecting them. They found that the wording in the narrowed claims was too vague to clearly identify exactly what Smucker's is trying to patent. Because Smucker's failed to respond to the BPAI's rejections within the two-month deadline, the PTO mailed a Notice of Intent to Issue a Reexamination Certificate (NIIRC) in December 2006 cancelling all claims. The reexamination certificate was issued on September 25, 2007.
A sandwich is a dish typically consisting of meat, cheese or vegetables used as a filling between slices of bread, or placed atop a slice of bread; or, more generally, any dish in which bread serves as a container or wrapper for another food type, and allows it to be a finger food. The sandwich began as a portable, convenient food in the Western world, though over time it has become prevalent worldwide.
Peanut butter is a food paste or spread made from ground, dry-roasted peanuts. It commonly contains additional ingredients that modify the taste or texture, such as salt, sweeteners, or emulsifiers. Consumed in many countries, it is the most commonly used of the nut butters, a group that also includes cashew butter and almond butter.
The J.M. Smucker Company, also known as Smuckers, is an American manufacturer of food and beverage products. Headquartered in Orrville, Ohio, the company was founded in 1897 as a maker of apple butter. J.M. Smucker currently has three major business units: consumer foods, pet foods, and coffee. Its flagship brand, Smucker's, produces fruit preserves, peanut butter, syrups, frozen crustless sandwiches, and ice cream toppings.
Dutch cuisine is formed from the cooking traditions and practices of the Netherlands. The country's cuisine is shaped by its location on the fertile Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta at the North Sea, giving rise to fishing, farming, and overseas trade. Due to the availability of water and flat grassland, the Dutch diet contains many dairy products such as butter and cheese. The court of the Burgundian Netherlands enriched the cuisine of the elite in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th century, so did in the 17th and 18th century colonial trade, when the Dutch ruled the spice trade, played a pivotal role in the global spread of coffee, and started the modern era of chocolate, by developing the Dutch process chocolate.
Jif is an American brand of peanut butter made by The J.M. Smucker Company, which purchased the brand from Procter & Gamble in 2001.
Skippy is an American brand of peanut butter manufactured in the United States and China. First sold in 1932, Skippy is currently manufactured by Hormel Foods, which bought the brand from Unilever in 2013. It is the best-selling brand of peanut butter in China and second only to the J.M. Smucker Company's Jif brand worldwide.
A pie iron, also called pudgy pie iron, sandwich toaster, snackwicher, toastie maker, sandwich maker, is a cooking appliance that consists of two hinged concave, round or square, cast iron or aluminium plates on long handles. Its "clamshell" design resembles that of a waffle iron, but without the checkered pattern. Pie irons are used to heat, toast and seal the sandwich.
A fluffernutter is a sandwich made with peanut butter and marshmallow creme usually served on white bread. Variations of the sandwich include the substitution of wheat bread and the addition of various sweet, salty, and savory ingredients. The term fluffernutter can also be used to describe other food items, primarily desserts, that incorporate peanut butter and marshmallow creme.
In United States patent law, a reexamination is a process whereby anyone—third party or inventor—can have a U.S. patent reexamined by a patent examiner to verify that the subject matter it claims is patentable. To have a patent reexamined, an interested party must submit prior art, in the form of patents or printed publications, that raises a "substantial new question of patentability". The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act makes substantial changes to the U.S. patent system, including new mechanisms for challenging patents at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. One of the new mechanisms is a post-grant review proceeding, which will provide patent challengers expanded bases on which to attack patents.
Sándwiches de miga, also called rafaelitos or simply sánguches, are popular food items in Argentina and Uruguay, where they are often consumed at parties. Rather than making them from scratch, Argentines usually buy them at a local bakery. They can be toasted or untoasted. The toasted version is common bar food in both countries, known locally as tostados or carlitos in Argentina, and sándwiches calientes in Uruguay.
Fool's Gold Loaf is a sandwich made by the Colorado Mine Company, a restaurant in Denver, Colorado. It consists of a single warmed, hollowed-out loaf of bread filled with the contents of one jar of creamy peanut butter, one jar of grape jelly, and one pound (454 g) of bacon.
Pizza snack rolls are a frozen food product consisting of bite-sized breaded pizza pockets with an interior of tomato sauce, imitation cheese, and various pizza toppings. They are sold in a variety of flavors including cheese, pepperoni, sausage, supreme, multiple imitation cheeses, and mixed meats. Other flavors included hamburger, cheeseburger, ham and cheese, and combination. Pizza snack rolls are designed to be quickly cooked in the oven or microwave. The name "pizza rolls" is a trademark of General Mills, current owner of the original product.
Goober is a combination of peanut butter and jelly in a single jar. It is sold in US, the UK, Canada, Singapore, and other parts of the Commonwealth, and is named after a familiar denomination for peanut in American English, goober pea, from the Gullah name for the peanut, guber. Goober was introduced by The J.M. Smucker Company under the Smucker's brand.
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich (PB&J) consists of peanut butter and fruit preserves spread on bread. The sandwich is popular in the United States, especially among children; a 2002 survey showed the average American will eat 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before graduating from high school. There are many variations of the PB&J, which itself is a hybrid between a peanut butter sandwich and a jam sandwich.
A jam sandwich is usually composed of two slices of bread with jam in the middle. It is normally consumed at lunchtime or as a snack. In Scotland, they are also known as pieces and jam, or jeely pieces.
The peanut butter and banana sandwich (PB&B), or peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich (PB,B&B), sometimes referred to as an Elvis sandwich, the Velvet Elvis, or simply the Elvis, is a sandwich with toasted bread, peanut butter, sliced or mashed banana, and occasionally bacon. Honey or jelly is seen in some variations of the sandwich. The sandwich is frequently cooked in a pan or on a griddle.
Peanut Butter & Co. is a peanut butter brand based in New York City. Founded in 1998 by Lee Zalben, from 1998 to 2016, the company operated a sandwich shop in Greenwich Village, which sold gourmet peanut butter sandwiches for $5. The company by 1999 was selling a line of peanut butter to supermarkets featuring ten "all natural" flavors and from peanuts grown by farmers in the United States. In 2005 the company published The Peanut Butter & Co. Cookbook.
A sandwich cookie, also known as a sandwich biscuit, is a type of cookie made from two thin cookies or medium cookies with a filling between them. Many types of fillings are used, such as cream, ganache, buttercream, chocolate, cream cheese, jam, peanut butter, lemon curd, or ice cream.
Indo cuisine is a fusion cooking and cuisine tradition, mainly existing in Indonesia and the Netherlands, as well as Belgium, South Africa and Suriname. This cuisine characterized of fusion cuisine that consists of original Indonesian cuisine with Eurasian-influences—mainly Dutch, also Portuguese, Spanish, French and British—and vice versa. Nowaday, not only Indo people consume Indo cuisine, but also Indonesians and Dutch people.