A sealed crustless sandwich is a type of peanut butter and jelly sandwich for which the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) awarded Menusaver, Inc. a patent (U.S. Patent 6,004,596) on December 21, 1999 for its invention. Menusaver, owned by The J.M. Smucker Co., began sending letters to other peanut butter and jelly sandwich manufacturers and urged them to cease patent infringement.
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 invoke this application as an example of a dangerous and frivolous patent. The patent examiner, Lien Tran, consulted on a minimal amount of prior art: seven previous patents issued between 1963 and 1998, and a 1994 book called 50 Great Sandwiches, concluding that the model was original. However a 1949 patent (U.S. Patent 2,463,439) was issued for 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".
In 2001, a small grocery and caterer in Gaylord, Michigan, Albie's Food, Inc., was sent a cease and desist letter from Smucker's, 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. Eventually, though, the parties reached a private settlement, and no ruling was made on the validity of Smucker's patent, which is still considered effective. Currently, Smucker's is selling the patented sandwiches under the "Uncrustables" trademark.
Smucker's also attempted to patent the process of making the sandwich in 2004 (rather than just the sandwich itself) and had its application rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC).[1] on April 8, 2005.