alt Hacker NewsMaybe I'm just a fuddy-duddy but my eyes about rolled out of my head reading this. The same article could probably be written about multiple companies and it'd be just as uninteresting. It's my understanding that there isn't anything special about WD-40, as in alternatives exist that can work just as well. Now, I think WD-40 is a brand name that can be trusted to work well more often than most alternatives but that is more about process than recipe (I would think).
I've long thought that every restaurant/bakery/etc could publish their full internal cookbooks and not see a drop in sales. People don't buy it because they are incapable (or think they are) of making something, they do it because it's faster, they don't have all the ingredients, they don't have the time, they don't have the skill, the list goes on. I bet I could give the instructions, the equipment, and the ingredients to people and they'd still choose to buy it. Sure, you might lose a tiny bit of sales to "home bakers" [0] but I think it'd be eclipsed by people that saw/read/heard about the cookbook (maybe never even saw it) and that was enough "marketing" to get them in the door.
I've always found "secret knowledge" to be a little silly. A sort of, security through obscurity. Knowing a recipe doesn't make you special, being able to build/run a company around it and make it consistently good does.
[0] I love to cook, I sometimes like making copy-cat recipes. I cannot think of a copy-cat recipe that I made more than 2-3 times. While it's fun to do, it's never exactly the same, and I also believe that "food tastes better when someone else makes it". Also it can sometimes be just-as or more expensive to make some food items due to needing a bunch of ingredients that they don't sell in exactly the quantity the recipe calls for.
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> I've long thought that every restaurant/bakery/etc could publish their full internal cookbooks and not see a drop in sales.
Absolutely. Chad Robertson of Tartine bakery has written books detailing how to make their breads and pastries. Still lines out the door.
Nothing gets gearhead nerds going more than arguing about lubricants and gas. Ask the wrong group of dudes about when to change your oil at breakfast, and they will still be going at dinner.
> I've long thought that every restaurant/bakery/etc could publish their full internal cookbooks and not see a drop in sales.
Makes me think of all those stories[0] employing a "secret recipe" plot. Some baking/cooking recipe (or a whole cookbook), written down by grandma and passed down in the family, or such, is critical to the fate of a bakery/restaurant/Thanksgiving dinner/etc.; predictably, it gets stolen, and suddenly the meal everyone loves cannot be made anymore.
It's a dumb idea if you think about it for more than a second - even the worst home cook will naturally memorize all the ingredients and steps after using the recipe more than couple times. If the process involves more than one person, there's bound to be copies and derivative documents (e.g. shopping lists) around, too. Recipes are good checklists and are particularly helpful when onboarding new cooks, but losing an actively used one isn't a big deal - it can be recreated on the spot by those who already know it by heart.
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[0] - One I've watched recently was Hoodwinked! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodwinked!. Great movie, but out of all the absurdities in it, by far the biggest one was the whole "stealing recipes to put bakeries out of business" plot driver.