The Sandwich Has Acquired Counsel

CaseJ.M. Smucker Co. v. Trader Joe's Co.CourtU.S. District Court, N.D. OhioFiledOct. 13, 2025Current postureAug. 28 order kept the dilution claim and venue in Ohio; no merits ruling yet.

I believed, incorrectly, that the Uncrustable had reached maximum complexity.

The ProbleMattic archive had already asked a completely unreasonable number of questions about a frozen peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. What, exactly, counts as a crust? What happens to the bread removed at industrial scale? Why does the internet need elaborate tutorials for making at home a shortcut to a meal that was already easy? The sandwich had wandered through classification, waste, sustainability, industrial design, search behavior and the larger theory I eventually called Internet Crust: the layer of manufactured complication that grows around a simple thing because the surrounding system needs more surface area.

In "The Crust Situation," I wrote that by the time an online recipe finishes explaining a homemade Uncrustable, "the sandwich has acquired a project manager."9

I apologize for underestimating the sandwich, because the sandwich has acquired federal counsel.

THE SANDWICH ENTERS FEDERAL COURT

The J.M. Smucker Company sued Trader Joe's in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on Oct. 13, 2025. The complaint alleges trademark infringement, unfair competition, false designation of origin, trademark dilution, violations of Ohio's Deceptive Trade Practices Act and related common-law claims. Smucker calls Trader Joe's frozen crustless peanut-butter-and-strawberry-jam sandwiches an "obvious copycat."1

The accusation is visually specific. Smucker says consumers identify Uncrustables through a collection of design cues: the round, pie-like sandwich shape; what the complaint calls "distinct peripheral undulated crimping"; pictures of the intact round sandwich; pictures of the sandwich with a bite taken out to expose filling; and, in the packaging dispute, prominent blue elements that Smucker argues sit too close to its own presentation.1

The relief Smucker requested is equally specific and much more dramatic. It wants an injunction, an accounting of Trader Joe's profits, damages, attorneys' fees and an order requiring Trader Joe's to turn over allegedly infringing products, wrappers, cartons and marketing material for destruction.1 The Associated Press highlighted that destruction request in its Sept. 1 report on the case.3

This is the point where the story sounds insane because, at grocery-store scale, it is hard to hear the phrase "deliver the sandwiches up for destruction" without imagining a federal marshal standing beside a freezer case with a clipboard and a sidearm.

But the complaint is more careful than the viral version of the story. Smucker expressly says it does not object to competitors selling prepackaged, frozen, thaw-and-eat crustless sandwiches. It is not asking a court to declare that only one corporation may place peanut butter and jelly between pieces of bread and remove the crust. Its claim is narrower: that Trader Joe's copied a combination of visual features Smucker says consumers now use to identify source.1

That distinction is the whole case.

WHAT SMUCKER IS ACTUALLY TRYING TO OWN

Trademark law is not supposed to grant permanent ownership of useful ideas. It protects signs of source: names, logos, packaging and, in some circumstances, the appearance of a product itself. That last category is where this sandwich becomes legally interesting.

Smucker's complaint identifies several federal registrations tied to Uncrustables design marks. It says it has used the crimped, pie-like product configuration since at least 1996 and a bitten-sandwich image since at least 2000. The company alleges those features are valid, distinctive and non-functional, and that the public has learned to associate them with Smucker.1

The Supreme Court has been cautious about claims like this. In Wal-Mart Stores v. Samara Brothers, the Court held that product design does not get treated as inherently distinctive just because it looks unusual. Product design becomes protectable as trade dress only when it has acquired "secondary meaning", when consumers have learned to see the design as identifying the maker, not merely the object.7

That is the real question beneath the absurdity: if somebody hands you an unwrapped, round, crimped, crustless PB&J, does the shape itself tell you "Uncrustables" before you see a logo? Smucker says yes. Trader Joe's has every incentive to say the shape is simply what a sealed sandwich looks like when you make it work.

In other words, the federal case is asking a version of the same classification question the Junk Drawer has been asking all summer, only now the answer can carry an injunction.

CIRCLE, SQUIRCLE, FUNCTION JUNCTION

Trader Joe's has supplied the case with the word it was destined to produce: "squircle."

According to the AP's account of Trader Joe's January filing, the grocer argues that its sandwiches are not round but squircle-shaped, squares with rounded edges, and that the crimped perimeter is necessary to keep the filling inside. Trader Joe's also attacked Smucker's dilution theory, arguing that the particular design marks at issue are not famous in the demanding legal sense required for federal dilution protection. "Smucker reaches too far," the company told the court.3

The squircle argument is funny. The functionality argument is not.

More than a quarter-century ago, the patent for the "sealed crustless sandwich" that became part of the Uncrustables story described a "crimped edge" around the bread perimeter for the purpose of sealing filling between the bread layers. The patent's claims likewise describe the crimp as a sealing mechanism.5

That earlier engineering language does not automatically decide the present trademark case. The registrations, the precise features Smucker claims, the procedural posture and the evidence the parties develop all matter. But it makes Trader Joe's central point easy to understand: a crimp can be visually recognizable and still be doing actual sandwich work.

The Supreme Court's TrafFix decision explains why that matters. A product feature that is functional, essential to the use or purpose of the article, or affecting its cost or quality, cannot be monopolized through trade dress. And a utility patent can be strong evidence that a claimed feature is functional.6

Put less judicially: if the ridge exists because the jelly otherwise escapes, trademark law has to be careful before giving one seller permanent control of the ridge.

This is the unusually clean collision at the center of the case. The perimeter may have two jobs. It may keep the filling in. It may also, after decades of exposure, tell consumers who made the sandwich. Smucker is arguing that the second job has become valuable intellectual property. Trader Joe's is arguing that the first job prevents Smucker from fencing off ordinary sandwich engineering.

THE OLD CRUST QUESTION COMES BACK

This is where all those earlier Uncrustable questions stop looking quite as disconnected as they once did.

The archive's original joke was that the product promises absence, no crust, while still depending on a perimeter. The ordinary bread crust is removed, but the sandwich cannot become edge-free. Something has to replace the structural job the crust-adjacent perimeter once performed. The result is a compressed seal: not crust in the bakery sense, but unmistakably an engineered boundary.

That boundary then became part of the brand.

The same substitution showed up in the waste question. Removing a crust from the consumer experience does not cause the removed bread to cease existing. The material goes somewhere. Product design moves the problem. ProbleMattic's later Uncrustables work followed that displaced crust into waste handling and remediation, eventually becoming its own search-visible branch of the archive.10

The lawsuit is another version of the same mechanism. Remove the brand name from the individual wrapper, as Smucker alleges Trader Joe's does, and visual meaning does not necessarily disappear. It migrates into shape, crimping, color, the bitten-sandwich picture and the accumulated familiarity of the object itself.1

The legal dispute is, in part, a fight over where brand meaning goes when the word mark is not doing all the work.

THE BUSINESS UNDER THE ABSURDITY

Smucker's aggressiveness makes more sense when the scale is visible.

In the complaint, the company says it has invested more than $1 billion over at least two decades developing goodwill and trademark rights around Uncrustables, produces roughly 1.5 billion sandwiches annually across plants in Kentucky, Colorado and Alabama, and was "fast on" its way to becoming a $1 billion brand when the suit was filed.1 Separately, Smucker disclosed in federal securities filings that it planned a $1.1 billion manufacturing and distribution facility in McCalla, Alabama dedicated to Uncrustables production, an investment it described as a response to rising demand.8

Smucker's June 2026 fiscal-year results continued to report volume growth for Uncrustables in both retail frozen handheld products and its away-from-home business.11

This is not a company dispatching lawyers because somebody made a sandwich in the same general shape at a church picnic. It is protecting a high-growth product into which it has poured industrial-scale capital.

That does not mean every claim is correct. It explains why the company cares.

At this scale, a circle is no longer merely geometry. A crimp is no longer merely texture. A blue package is no longer merely blue. If those details reliably tell consumers what product they are seeing from ten feet away in a freezer aisle, those details carry financial value. Trademark law exists partly because that kind of recognition can be an asset.

The harder question is how much ordinary product architecture a company should be able to convert into that asset.

WHAT THE JUDGE ACTUALLY RULED

The newest development is important precisely because headlines can make it sound larger than it is.

On Aug. 28, U.S. District Judge John R. Adams denied Trader Joe's motion attacking Smucker's federal dilution claim and refused to transfer the case to California. The order means the case remains in Ohio and Smucker's dilution theory survives the pleading stage.24

It does not mean the judge has ruled that Trader Joe's sandwiches infringe Smucker's trademarks. It does not mean the court has decided that crimping is non-functional. It does not mean Smucker has proven consumer confusion. And it does not mean a federal court has now granted Smucker ownership of the circle.

The order is narrower. Judge Adams wrote that Smucker had alleged enough facts about advertising, sales, registration and recognition to plausibly claim fame for its design marks and move into discovery. He specifically noted that harder questions about individual marks were better suited for summary judgment after evidence is developed.2

That procedural distinction matters. "The lawsuit can proceed" is not a synonym for "Smucker won." It means the argument is legally substantial enough that the court will not discard it before the parties build the evidentiary record.

The venue fight ended the same way. Trader Joe's pointed to its California headquarters and a third-party producer in Los Angeles County. Adams acknowledged some convenience arguments favoring California but found the overall balance close, noted Ohio's local interest in a dispute involving an Ohio-headquartered company and gave Smucker's choice of a proper forum substantial weight.2

So the sandwich stays in Ohio. Procedurally, at least.

THE INTERNET CRUST BECOMES PROCEDURAL CRUST

The first Uncrustables essay was about a simple task becoming surrounded by so much explanation that the content became larger than the thing itself. The useful answer was buried beneath equipment lists, optimization, storage notes, FAQs and enough technique to make peanut butter feel credentialed.

Federal litigation is obviously not SEO content, and the dispute involves real property rights and real money. But the cultural rhyme is too exact to ignore.

The simple object now carries a complaint, six attached trademark registrations, a motion to dismiss, a transfer request, an opposition, a reply, an order, a forthcoming discovery record, product photographs, decades of advertising evidence, consumer-recognition arguments, Supreme Court doctrine and the word "squircle."

The Internet Crust has become procedural crust and yet the thing underneath remains almost insultingly small: bread, peanut butter, fruit spread and a sealed edge.

This is why Uncrustables kept becoming a useful ProbleMattic subject in the first place. The sandwich is never really about the sandwich for very long. It is about classification. Convenience. Waste. Design. Naming. Industrial scale. The strange human habit of taking an ordinary object and loading it with systems until the ordinary object becomes a doorway into everything around it.

Google kept sending increasingly specific questions into the archive because the object supports them. What is an Uncrustable? Does it have a crust? Where does the discarded crust go? What does the shape mean?

Federal court has now added another: Who owns the edge?

THE SIMPLE QUESTION UNDER ALL OF IT

Strip away the pleadings and the memes and the inevitable jokes about sandwich law, and the case presents a genuinely useful cultural question about modern brands.

Companies increasingly sell products whose identities live not only in names but in silhouette, interface, color, packaging, texture and ritual. We recognize a bottle before we read the label, a shoe from its profile, a phone from its geometry, a snack from the shape of the bag. At enough scale, design stops being decoration and becomes language.

But products also have to function. A handle has to be holdable. A bottle needs an opening. A sealed sandwich needs some method of remaining sealed. Trademark law cannot simply award the first successful company permanent control over every useful visual consequence of solving the engineering problem.

That is why this apparently ridiculous case is worth watching. Not because the republic needs a final judicial definition of a squircle, although I am now emotionally invested in receiving one. It is worth watching because the court has to separate recognition from function: the part of the sandwich that says "Smucker" from the part of the sandwich that says "please keep the jelly inside."

Smucker may eventually prove that Trader Joe's crossed that line. Trader Joe's may show that the similarities are functional, insufficiently distinctive or unlikely to confuse consumers. The Aug. 28 ruling decides none of that. It merely ensures the parties now have to develop the evidence.2

For months, the Uncrustables archive has been asking how much conceptual weight one small frozen sandwich can carry.

We have an answer. More. Apparently, always more. For once, nobody can simply cut the crust off the question.

REPORTING NOTE

This piece distinguishes allegations from findings. Smucker's factual assertions about copying, confusion, fame and non-functionality come from its complaint and have not been proven. Judge Adams's Aug. 28 order resolved a partial motion to dismiss directed at the dilution claim and a venue-transfer request; it did not decide infringement on the merits. The patent discussion is included to explain the functionality issue, not to predict how the court will apply it to Smucker's registered design marks. Status checked through Sept. 1, 2026; this is reported cultural analysis, not legal advice.

SOURCES & DOCUMENTS

J.M. Smucker Company v. Trader Joe's Company, Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial, No. 5:25-cv-02181, ECF No. 1 (N.D. Ohio filed Oct. 13, 2025). Primary source for Smucker's allegations, trademark registrations described in the pleading, production-scale claims and requested relief. SourceJ.M. Smucker Company v. Trader Joe's Company, Order, No. 5:25-cv-02181, ECF No. 13 (N.D. Ohio Aug. 28, 2026), Judge John R. Adams. Primary source for the ruling on the partial motion to dismiss and motion to transfer. SourceDee-Ann Durbin, Associated Press, "Judge says Smucker's lawsuit against Trader Joe's over frozen PB&J can proceed," Sept. 1, 2026. Used for Trader Joe's "squircle" position, its quoted response and contemporaneous reporting on the dispute. SourceFederal docket, J.M. Smucker Company v. Trader Joe's Company, No. 5:25-cv-02181 (N.D. Ohio). Confirms filing date, motion sequence, counsel activity and docket posture. SourceU.S. Patent No. 6,004,596, "Sealed crustless sandwich," granted Dec. 21, 1999. The patent describes a crimped perimeter used to seal filling between bread layers. SourceTrafFix Devices, Inc. v. Marketing Displays, Inc., 532 U.S. 23 (2001). U.S. Supreme Court authority on trade-dress functionality and the evidentiary significance of utility patents. SourceWal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Brothers, Inc., 529 U.S. 205 (2000). U.S. Supreme Court authority requiring secondary meaning for product-design trade dress. SourceThe J.M. Smucker Company, Form 10-K for fiscal year ended Apr. 30, 2024. Company disclosure describing the planned $1.1 billion McCalla, Alabama, Uncrustables manufacturing and distribution facility. SourceProbleMattic archive, "The Crust Situation" (Junk Drawer, July 2026). Prior essay establishing the "Internet Crust" framework and the line about the sandwich acquiring a project manager. SourceProbleMattic, Semantic Corpus Discovery Experiment: Phase I Technical Report (Aug. 2026). Internal archive report documenting the Uncrustables cluster's definitional, design, waste and sustainability branches and the search visibility of the removed-crust/waste descendant piece. SourceThe J.M. Smucker Co., fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter and full-year results, June 9, 2026. Company reporting cited for continued Uncrustables volume growth across retail and away-from-home channels. Source