Secret sauce

 se·cret sauce

A special quality that makes something successful :

An element, quality, ability, or practice that makes something or someone successful or distinctive. If leadership has a secret sauce, it may well be humility. A humble boss understands that there are things he doesn't know.

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noun

US

1. A special quality or feature regarded as the chief factor in the success of something or someone.

   "the company's secret sauce is its grasp of how content spreads online."

The company is going to need some secret sauce to make the takeover work.

Not protecting intellectual property can lead to someone else stealing a company's secret sauce.

• Every private equity firm has its own secret sauce.
• The event space, which seats 200, is the store's secret sauce.
• They were afraid that their secret sauce would leak out and their rivals in the industry would get their hands on this technology.

“In the original 1968 commercial, McDonald's never mentioned a 'special sauce. ' They called their new creation 'secret' sauce.” That expression — “secret sauce” — dates back to at least 1906 and is also a pretty generic turn of phrase.