The Burlap Bag Lawsuit

The three of us ran our restaurants and bread baking business while taking care of our parents, both of whom were very sick.

If you want to know who we really are, then you can read, listen, and watch more here.

This page isn’t here to promote our business or our brand. It’s here because Vieira’s Bakery has attempted to discredit, degrade, demean, and disparage all of our hard work in an attempt to save face and get away with the theft of our intellectual property.

Our story has not changed since day one.

We signed an NDA with Vieira's Bakery in good faith back in 2016. Arzu came up with the burlap bag design in 2017 on a random night after working a twelve-plus-hour shift at the restaurant.

What happened after that is now the subject of a federal lawsuit.

What we did not expect was how much of that lawsuit would become about us. Because Vieira’s Bakery hasn’t been able to defend what it did, there was another strategy available:

Put the people accusing them on trial instead. Attack our character. Lie about who we are and how we achieved what we achieved.

In our view, that has been the defense all along. Not simply that our bag wasn't copied, but that we are not worth protecting.

They’ve bullied us through their attorneys privately and made every possible threat to get us to back down. Yet, here we are, still standing. STILL fighting.

Instead of only litigating a burlap bread bag, we have watched our lives become evidence.

For nearly four years, our personal and professional social media accounts have been monitored. Our posts have been screenshotted and provided to lawyers. In one instance, one of our LinkedIn posts was recorded using another phone, and the recording itself was produced in discovery.

Think about that.

A post on a public platform was not simply read or screenshotted. Someone used another phone to record it, and that recording eventually became part of federal litigation over the packaging of bread.

Pieces of our lives, including our businesses, our family history, our ambitions, our relationships, our struggles, and the things we shared publicly simply because we were trying to inspire others, have been pulled from their original context and arranged into a version of us that we don’t recognize.

We understand the risk of telling your story publicly. Once you put something into the world, you lose control over how someone else reads it.

People can disagree with you. They can criticize you. They can screenshot you. They can tell you that you failed. They can even tell their own version of events.

But access to someone's story does not confer ownership of it. And scrutiny is not the same thing as distortion.

In our view, Vieira's has repeatedly attempted to use pieces of our publicly shared history to diminish or discredit nearly two decades of entrepreneurship by our family, at times portraying us as unsuccessful while simultaneously attempting to associate itself with, or take credit for, aspects of the success of Thumb Bread®.

You cannot simultaneously argue that what someone built was insignificant and attempt to claim a role in building it. That contradiction has not been lost on us.

And eventually, things that had absolutely nothing to do with a burlap bread bag found their way into this fight.

A relative of Vieira's sales representative, Melissa Calrow, targeted people connected to our business, including customers and collaborators.

Then our father passed away. After his death, Melissa Calrow's cousin, AnnMarie Calderaro, went onto a tribute post honoring our father and called him “terrorist scum.”

We have the screenshot.

Our father had nothing to do with this lawsuit. He was not a plaintiff. He wasn’t a defendant. He didn’t design Vieira's packaging. He didn’t sign the NDA.

He was our father. He was a good man who came to America in pursuit of a dream. He worked hard. He never lied, he never cheated, and he never stole anything from anyone.

There are lines you do not cross simply because someone in your family is involved in a business dispute. A memorial to someone's dead parent should be one of them.

Meanwhile, we have received letter after letter demanding that we take our public statements down. We’ve watched Melissa Calrow attempt to paint herself as the victim. Opposing counsel tried to shame us into retracting our public statements and social media posts. At several points during our deposition, opposing counsel even mocked our traumatic experiences and called us 'liars'.

We won’t do it. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

What we shared publicly, Vieira’s has never once attempted to fight back on because there is nothing that they can disagree with. They can only lie and continue lying.

And there is something else worth saying.

There is a great deal we have never made public.

During our relationship with people connected to Vieira's, highly sensitive and deeply personal information was shared with us by Melissa Calrow concerning herself and others.

We kept it private. We didn’t publish it. We didn’t turn it into content. We didn’t use it to humiliate Melissa Calrow, Carlos Vieira, Carleen Vieira, or anyone else because it had nothing to do with a bread bag.

And because despite everything that has happened, we believe there are boundaries that should survive even the ugliest dispute.

We have spoken publicly about this lawsuit for several reasons. The first was because Vieira’s Bakery Inc. didn’t tell their customers what was going on. Instead, they continued selling the bag. The second was because they were making private threats towards us, to bury us in legal fees, telling us to get back to baking, basically, to get over it and accept the theft.

We have spoken about what happened to our company. We have spoken about our own experiences. And we have told our own family and entrepreneurial history. We stand behind our right to do that.

Nothing we have posted has ever been intended to defame Vieira's Bakery or anyone associated with it. During the litigation, the Magistrate Judge gave Vieira's an opportunity to pursue a defamation claim. They didn’t do so.

Vieira's has also had, and continues to have, access to the same public platforms we have. In fact, shortly after the cease and desist and again after the lawsuit was filed, they began to use their social media platforms in an attempt to appear as if they had been using burlap all along in their marketing.

They have a website and they have social media.

They have the ability, subject to the same legal restrictions applicable to the parties, to issue statements, discuss their company's history, respond to us, disagree with us, and tell their version of what happened.

They have chosen not to do so. That’s their choice.

We made a different one. We chose to document ours.

Their decision not to tell their story publicly doesn’t require us to stop telling ours.

And our willingness to speak publicly should not somehow transform the act of telling our own story into wrongdoing simply because the other side has chosen silence.

That is why this website exists. We have no plans to win arguments on the internet. You can’t win lawsuits of this magnitude on feelings. You don’t even have to agree with this… with any of it.

This website exists because after years of watching fragments of our lives collected, screenshotted, recorded, dissected, and rearranged, we decided to put the record in one place. We have been deeply hurt and traumatized by the infringement and the theft. We will not allow our family’s legacy to be trashed because Melissa Calrow and Vieira’s Bakery Inc. wanted to steal from us.

An entire industry participated in the theft of our intellectual property and profited off of our federally protected burlap bread bag, knowingly and unknowingly. We have a right to speak up about that theft.

You don’t have to take our word for it because eventually, all the discovery documents, the depositions, the expert reports, the filings, and the trial transcript become public information.

The truth can’t stay hidden forever.

We know when Thumb Bread® was created. We know where the burlap bread bag idea came from and originated. We know that no one was and no one is using it in their bread bag applications (only Vieira’s Bakery Inc. stole it and used it).

We know what we shared. We know what we signed. We know what happened next.

We know the years that came before this lawsuit. And we know the years it has consumed since.

Flatbread Grill® was founded by three sisters who came from nothing in 2007. We worked hard, VERY HARD, made an honest living, kept our heads buried in work to keep our father alive and get him the care he needed while also taking care of our disabled mother.

Thumb Bread® was created by Arzu Esendemir. The burlap bread bag idea was Arzu Esendemir’s.

The struggles were ours. The sacrifices were ours. The risks were ours. The failures were ours. The successes were ours. The sleepless nights were ours. The physical and mental sacrifices were all ours.

And this story is OURS.

Whatever ultimately happens in court, the history documented here remains our history.

People are free to read it. They are free to challenge it. They are free to disagree with us.

Vieira's is free to tell its own story. But no one gets to rewrite ours simply because they have spent years collecting pieces of it. Vieira’s Bakery Inc., Carlos Vieira, Carleen Vieira, and Melissa Calrow don’t get to stake a claim in it. Not today. NOT EVER!

They can continue lying all they want. They can continue attempting to discredit us.

We know what we built and we know what it took.

And we will not let anyone else rewrite our history.

This website is staying up indefinitely. Permanently.

Thank you for reading.