Kimball stole confidential information from America’s Test Kitchen, solicited America’s Test Kitchen employees and outside relationships and misappropriated corporate opportunities belonging to America’s Test Kitchen.”Īmong ATK’s allegations: that Kimball sought to capture the email addresses of readers that Gordon misrepresented herself as doing business for ATK while searching for real estate for Milk Street that Broide provided Kimball with media lists she had built while a consultant at ATK and that Kimball tried to recruit current ATK staff to work at Milk Street.Īccording to the suit, even after Kimball was officially terminated as an employee of ATK in November 2015, he maintained an 8.59 percent partnership interest in the company. “To quickly break into the marketplace with a viable and recognizable company,” it alleges, “Mr. Vereen/For The Washington Post)Īmerica’s Test Kitchen alleges that Kimball used company resources and relationships to create his new endeavor. Milk Street’s charter issue and a recent issue of Cook’s Illustrated. We’ve pored over the 39-page complaint, as well as emails attached to it. The suit also seeks “all profits Kimball and CPK Media derived from the theft and misappropriation of ATK’s confidential information, trade secrets and business opportunities.”
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It also seeks the return of a portion of Kimball’s 2015 salary, as well as part of Baldino’s, Gordon’s and Broide’s, since it accuses all of building Milk Street on ATK time.
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We’re trying to travel to actually go learn something.”Īmong other things, ATK is seeking damages for Kimball’s “breach of fiduciary duties,” from both Kimball and the co-defendants for “aiding and abetting” him. We’re trying to tell the story to give a little bit of context.
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With Milk Street, I think, we’re always starting someplace outside of Milk Street. “In my prior iteration, which lasted 35 years, there would be no starting point outside of the kitchen. . . “It’s just a whole new way of thinking about cooking,” Kimball said. But in an interview with The Post last month about the new venture, Kimball said Milk Street is inspired by global cuisine that is less reliant on heat and time and more so on spices and levels of flavor. Scott Lashway of the Boston office of firm Holland & Knight, the attorney representing Kimball and his co-defendants, declined to comment. I’m not the only one who has known Chris and worked with Chris for a long time, but we are here because of Chris’s actions,” said Bishop, who also frequently appeared with Kimball in “America’s Test Kitchen” and “Cook’s Country” segments. That’s because Kimball, one of ATK’s founders, is still considered a partial owner. “It’s more complex than a former employee going out and starting a new business,” Jack Bishop, ATK’s chief creative officer, said in an interview.
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Both companies are based in the greater Boston area. The lawsuit claims that Kimball essentially stole company resources to create a competing venture, Milk Street, that, like ATK, includes radio, television and online presences. (While “America’s Test Kitchen” is the brand’s flagship public television series, it’s also the name of the multimedia corporation that includes its cookbook operations, online cooking school, Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country magazines, a now-defunct radio show, and a variety of other assets.) Kimball spent the last year of his employment with America’s Test Kitchen creating a new venture which literally and conceptually ripped off America’s Test Kitchen,” the lawsuit says. His co-defendants are his wife and former ATK employee, Melissa Baldino Christine Gordon, Kimball’s former executive assistant at ATK and Deborah Broide, who worked as a public relations consultant for ATK. On Monday, as first reported by the Boston Globe, America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) filed a complaint in Massachusetts’s Suffolk County Superior Court against Kimball and his new company. Milk Street, Christopher Kimball’s new magazine, has been on stands for just about two weeks, and it’s already prompted a lawsuit from his former employer, America’s Test Kitchen. Former America’s Test Kitchen colleagues Christopher Kimball, second from left, and Jack Bishop, second from right, pictured in 2010, are now on opposite sides of a lawsuit filed by America’s Test Kitchen against Kimball because of his new Milk Street venture.