Thanks for all the kind people who responded to my post. I did learn alot from everyone who posted here and I just have one area where I still have questions. When you say you need "an enabling disclosure providing enough information for someone in the pretzel business to make cheese filled pretzels", I'm not quite sure how this would work. For example, in my scenario one person wouldn't sit there all day and fold some pretzel dough around a piece of cheese, but instead some type of machinery would be handling the process to presumbably make thousands of cheese filled pretzel sticks a day. Once again, this reverts back to my original write up where I state that I have no tool and die or machinery background, but I just have this phenomenal idea of frozen pretzel sticks with cheese in them. I guess what I'm alluding to would a sketch of how an individual would go about making a cheese filled pretzel stick suffice, even though the pretzel manufactures that might license the idea would for obvious reasons have machinery making the cheese filled pretzel sticks and not individuals sitting around rolling dough around cheese all day? In other words, if I provide drawings of how an ordinary individual would go about making the product suffice and it would be up to the manufactures to turn this method of how a human would do it into how machinery would do it?
I guess this might lead pretzel manufactures to come up with their own automation processes to get the cheese into pretzel sticks and subsequently patent the process. Now if this were to happen wouldn't my patent take precedence because without being licensed to make cheese filled pretzel sticks their patents for developing ways of getting cheese into pretzel sticks through automation would be irrelevant anyways? Once again, like you guys have dwelled on, I fully understand that I have to show a way how to make these and I would have no problem having artwork done showing how an individual would go about making these, but I wouldn't know how companies would go about mass producing these on an automated assembly line.
Just to clarify about my intitial post where I talked about approaching individual companies about my idea, I wouldn't do this until I actually filed the patent application and once I did I would then begin to contact manufactures about licensing my idea. Someone did raise a valid point, well what happens if I approach company "a" first and they reject my idea and want nothing to do with it, so now how do I approach company "b" and tell them that if they agree to license or buy my idea I will not approach company "a". I understand how this could be a problem and my reason for coming up with this strategy was that I always thought that my idea wasn't exactly screaming, "this will be approved, 100% guaranteed". I figure there is a possibility that a company will just run with my idea thinking that my patent application is weak, so I thought this strategy of not approaching the competition might prevent this from happening. For example, company "a" might say, "great idea, but our attorneys feel that you stand no chance of getting this patent approved, so we will just go ahead and do it ourselves. " My response would be, "maybe you are right, but what is the value of me keeping this idea out of the competitions' hands while you try to bring thise idea to market? Think about how much market share and more importantly customer loyalty you can gain while the competition plays catch up." I'm not pessimistic about this patent getting approved, but like I said before it is not screaming, "patent approved with no quesitons or problems whatsoever", so I just thought I could have an ace up my sleeve if a company thinks that they can walk over me and do it themselves without compensating me, so this is why I came up with this idea.
Thanks again to all the help that everyone has given me.
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