Even though High Liner claimed in a June lawsuit that former Rubicon executives stole trade secrets – and its Kroger frozen shrimp business – the ex-executives deny those claims.
In an answer to Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, Canada-based High Liner’s trade secrets complaint, filed in U.S. federal court in California, Justin Kirby and Nicholas Leonard, co-founders of Haven Foods, deny all the allegations made by High Liner.
High Liner’s original complaint states that Kirby, Leonard, Lucas Biging, and Ernest Dominguez, who worked in High Liner’s frozen shrimp division and now work for Haven Foods, utilized proprietary information to snatch Kroger’s “Simple Truth” shrimp business from High Liner.
Kirby and Leonard incorporated Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.-based Haven Foods in early February, and the company is based at a cold storage facility previously used by Rubicon to house millions of dollars of inventory for Rubicon’s customers, the complaint said.
However, Haven denies all the allegations in the High Liner complaint.
Specifically, it "denies that Leonard, Kirby, or Biging engaged in any unlawful conduct with respect to High Liner/Rubicon and/or High Liner/Rubicon's prior relationship with Kroger, and further denies that Biging waited six full days to notify Rubicon of the Kroger Request for Proposal,” Haven’s answer stated.
A week before Biging resigned, he received a request from Kroger inviting Rubicon to submit a bid for the opportunity to supply “Simple Truth” bagged shrimp to Kroger for two years, according to High Liner. Biging did not notify his Rubicon superiors about the request until six days after he received it, High Liner’s complaint said.
Kirby inadvertently forwarded – and then attempted to recall – an email to Rubicon email accounts, “which emails speak for themselves,” Haven stated in its answer to the complaint.
