Appeal No. 1996-2012
Application No. 08/146,025
kneader as required by the instant claims. In other words,
the examiner has not established any art-recognized
equivalence between the homogenization step of Antenore and
the kneading operation of appellant’s claimed process. Of
interest in this regard is the fact that, according to
appellant’s specification (page 2, lines 12-17), the material
passed through the kneader in appellant’s process is
"conventional butter" rather than inverted cream (liquid
butter); conventional butter apparently being more amenable to
kneading than the "liquid" butter of Antenore. Simply put, we
find no suggestion or motivation in the prior art to pass a
liquid product (the inverted cream of Antenore) through a
kneader.
In a similar vein, the examiner has also failed to
provide any factual basis or convincing rationale to support
either her conclusion that "to use inverted cream versus
butter is seen to be an obvious substitution", or her
conclusion that the claimed stepwise addition of vegetable
oil, rather than a one step addition as in Antenore, "is seen
to be an obvious matter of choice with regard to the
particular extent of mixing that is desired and with regard to
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