Seafood company has not identified stolen trade secrets, competitor says
A seafood supplier has not identified the trade secrets that it accused one of its competitors of stealing, according to newly-filed court documents, Seafood Source has reported.
Florida-based seafood company Tampa Bay Fisheries has been accused of stealing the secrets by another seafood supplier, National Fish and Seafood (NFS).
But NFS “has produced no responsive documents, no substantive interrogatory responses, and no identification of the alleged trade secrets taken by Tampa Bay”, according to Tampa Bay.
The update comes as part of an ongoing legal battle between the two companies in which NFS said that one of its former employees, Kathleen Scanlon, stole trade secrets before going to work for Tampa Bay.
In July 2018, NFS filed a complaint at the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts alleging that Scanlon breached her duties and unlawfully acquired NFS’s confidential information and secrets.
Scanlon, who was NFS’s director of research and development and quality assurance, allegedly stole the information one day before she resigned and announced her intent to join Tampa Bay, a company which NFS said is a direct competitor.
NFS also claimed Scanlon made video recordings and took photographs of NFS’s confidential and propriety clam production process, which it uses to make its clam-based seafood products.
Additionally, NFS said Scanlon forwarded NFS’s confidential ingredient list and other documents to her personal email account.
There is currently a hearing set for late February which will discuss the documents NFS wants Tampa Bay to produce. The case is scheduled to go to trial in July.
In the latest filing, Tampa Bay said it has not received the documents identifying the trade secrets NFS alleges were stolen, and they have been “outstanding for months”. It said it needs these so that it can “obtain the third-party discovery needed to defend itself”.
According to Tampa Bay, although NFS originally alleged that Tampa Bay obtained NFS’s recipes through Scanlon, “the court-ordered forensic exam proved otherwise”.
Tampa Bay added that because of this, the court lifted a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that had previously been set. It claimed that since then, “NFS has still done nothing to comply with its most basic discovery obligations”.
In October 2018, US District Judge Leo Sorokin removed an injunction against Scanlon, allowing her to work for Tampa Bay.
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