Objects

The Potato Product Makes Its Entrance in Slices

Lamb Weston lost its waffle-fry patent in 1996 for being obvious. Thirty years on, the shape fight has moved somewhere the patent office almost never says no.

Clay-diorama editorial illustration of golden potato pieces on a ceramic plate.

What changes in this design

A reader might otherwise assume that a patent image explains what an item is made of, how it operates, or how well it performs.

This record stays with visible features. Its figure presents a long, narrow, straight-sided form drawn from lower left to upper right, with an angled end, lengthwise parallel lines, and small triangular outlined forms near both sides.

That distinction helps keep the image in proportion. You can notice its lines, surfaces, and outline without treating the picture as proof of materials, operation, or a promised result.

Gib Lamb's water gun knife, 1950

In 1950 a man named F. Gilbert Lamb opened a plant in Weston, Oregon. He built the water gun knife, which his company still calls the first machine to cut fries under high water pressure. What that device really did was make novelty cheap. Once you can push a potato through any arrangement of blades at speed, the fry's shape stops being a constraint and becomes a decision.

The catalogue followed. The curly cut arrived in 1983, the lattice cut in 1984. Seventy-five years later the same company is still filing on shapes, and the newest one issued this August.

The waffle cut that could not be owned

The 1984 lattice cut, sold as CrissCut, came with a utility patent. US 4,937,084, filed in December 1984 by John C. Julian and granted in 1990, described an ellipsoidal potato section with intersecting ridges and grooves: thickness between 4/16 and 10/16 of an inch, 7/16 preferred; ridge spacing about 28/100 inch; knife amplitude 30/100 inch; parfried oil content 6 to 20 percent by weight. That is what a utility claim costs you. Numbers, ranges, a process, all open to argument.

The argument came. On February 29, 1996 the Federal Circuit affirmed that the patent was invalid as obvious, holding that a skilled person had reason to combine a known waffle cut with an established parfrying method. No damages. No injunction. The shape went back to being something anyone could cut.

Eighty-nine documents for three words

Search the patent literature for the exact phrase 'cut potato product' and you get 89 documents. The design patents alone run to dozens: D901128, D934532, D1022384 through D1022389, D1044200, D1133377, and on. Most carry the same seven views, perspective through rear, and the same single sentence of claim: the ornamental design for a cut potato product, as shown and described.

D1140502 is the newest. Application 29/983,429, filed January 10, 2025, issued August 11, 2026, assigned to Lamb Weston B.V. Seven drawings. One sentence. It cites more than forty references, the oldest from 1939, including earlier entries from the same portfolio. The predecessor, D1044200, names the person behind the run: Dirk Jacob van Dijk, filing from the Dutch side of the business. The assignee line changed between the two because in 2022 the American parent agreed to buy out its European joint venture. Drawings filed by one entity now issue to another.

One sentence, and a four percent refusal rate

Here is the part I keep returning to. Design applications draw prior-art rejections in roughly 1 to 4 percent of cases. Utility applications draw them around 68 percent of the time. One study sampled 500 design patents granted between 2013 and 2023 to test the usual explanation, that duplicate filings inside families deflate the figure. Stripping duplicates moved the rate from about 4 percent to under five. The gap is real.

So moving from a utility claim to a design claim is not a smaller ask. It is the same ask, made where almost nobody says no.

May 2024 moved the ground

Except the ground moved. On May 21, 2024 the Federal Circuit, sitting en banc in LKQ v. GM, threw out the test that had governed design-patent obviousness for decades, the one demanding a primary reference basically the same as the claimed design. The court said it imposed limits the statute does not contain, and replaced it with the flexible inquiry used everywhere else. This application was filed about eight months later. It has not been tested under the standard that now applies to it.

The other route is no safer. A competitor, McCain Foods, patented the process instead, an electric-field treatment that softens vegetables before cutting. Canadian courts read the claim as covering roughly 2 to 200 volts per centimetre, which put a rival's thousand-volt equipment outside it. The appeal was dismissed in April 2026.

Where this leaves things

Meanwhile the thing being decorated is under pressure. In fiscal 2026 the company sold 7 percent more pounds and took 6 percent less on price and mix. Net sales rose 2 percent to $6.6 billion. Net income fell 19 percent. Earnings in the international segment, the one built from those European plants, dropped 55 percent, including a $33 million write-off of potatoes. Guidance for the next year is zero to one percent growth.

I do not think the filing is cynical. Somebody drew it. Somebody costed the knives. But I would not read it as evidence that something new exists. It is a marker planted on contested ground, granted by an office that rarely refuses these, in a family of dozens, while the business underneath it sells more and earns less. The 1996 case is the honest comparison. The last time this company asked to own a fry and had to defend the specifics, it lost.

Sources

Reporting for this piece drew on the published filing and the references below.

The record, briefly. USD1140502S1, “Cut Potato Product” The checked public record identifies a U.S. design patent titled 'Cut Potato Product'. The reading treats the published title and figure as a visual starting point and does not infer a material, mechanism, or performance claim not established there.

More angles on this

When Storage Is Part of the ObjectAnother reading from the same B62D classification family, motor vehicles; trailers.
A Work Vehicle, Taking Its Job Quite PersonallyAnother reading from the same B62D classification family, motor vehicles; trailers.
CPC A23G: CocoaThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
CPC B26D: Cutting; details common to machines for perforating, punching, cutting-out, stamping-out or severingThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
A Cart That Makes Room for the PauseAnother reading from the neighbouring B62B classification family, hand-propelled vehicles, e.g. hand carts or perambulators; sledges.

Read around this one:Public patent record USPTO published figure Patent issue-date index