In
Henny Penny Corp. v. Frymaster LLC (Fed. Cir. 2019), the
Federal Circuit again upheld the PTAB's application of its rule
prohibiting petitioners from raising new arguments in a reply
brief, and upheld the challenged claims as not unpatentable for
obviousness, relying in part on secondary considerations
evidence.
Henny Penny filed an IPR petition challenging a Frymaster patent
covering commercial deep fryers. The challenged claims recite a
system for monitoring frying oil impurities know as total polar
materials ("TPMs").The system includes a sensor for
monitoring TPM levels, and notifies the operator to change the oil
when TPM levels are too high. The petition relied on two
references: (1) Kauffman, which discloses an apparatus for
analyzing used oils, but does not monitor TPMs; and (2) Iwaguchi,
which discloses monitoring TPMs in deep fryers. Unlike Kauffman,
the Iwaguchi apparatus cools the cooking oil before detecting
impurities. The petition argued that the
