Crisp Cooking Tools Make Produce Prep a Snap

Crisp™ is a new line of 26 cooking tools from Tailor Made Products that have been two years in the making. The food preparation gadgets focus on making it easier to consume fresh fruits and veggies at home, with Millennials, healthy eating enthusiasts, and foodies as the target market.

Thoughtful touches throughout the Crisp line explain the years that went into the product development. There are a Straight Paring Knife and Bird’s Beak Paring Knife that each include a dual function sheath that protects and provides safe storage while also incorporating a built-in blade sharpener. The Melon Knife has a detachable seed scoop that stores conveniently in the handle. The oval-shaped Garlic Press has a one-handed design that works in a rocking motion and includes a slide to push the garlic up and out of the blade opening for easy removal.

The tools all feature contoured handles, angled blades, and a white color base with one of five Pantone colors as an accent. The accent colors were selected as a reflection of the produce preparation theme of the line.

“We picked out the most vibrant colors of produce that we could find, five different colors, and matched our Pantone colors to those fruits and vegetables, and that’s what you see in the line,” says Mike Marchewka, National Sales Director for Tailor Made Products. “You see it from orange, green, red, yellow and purple, chosen right from the garden.”

The white tools with pops of color and packaging to match are designed to stand out on store shelves. Of the 26 SKUs in the line, 24 are peggable in a 30-by-48-inch space, a valuable merchandising feature for independent retailers with limited space. The product packaging makes the new tools instantly consumer friendly by providing color photo examples of how to use the products on the back.

The multi-functional tools will appeal to the healthy eating crowd because of their ability to make fast work of preparing a batch of bulk produce for the week, says Marchewka. The line will appeal to Millennials because the generation enjoys making entertaining a group activity in which guests join in on the preparation.

“Outside of healthy eating, from an entertaining aspect, there’s some generational differences and Millennials will love them [the tools] because part of entertaining is the cooking experience,” says Marchewka. “Whereas perhaps a Baby Boomer generation would bring people over and they’d have everything ready to go, the table all set, etc., Millennials will bring people over and get them involved in the actual preparation of food, and hang in the kitchen and want to bring out their tools and say, ‘Hey, look how cool this is!’ and we think Crisp fits right into that trend as well.”

The rounds of testing from novice home cooks and experienced chefs ensures that Crisp tools aren’t just designed to be eye-catching, but fully functional enough to appeal to the foodie or cooking hobbyist. “We actually had a cook’s council, if you will, where each time we developed a product we got it to a point where we’re testing, we send it to the council. That ranged from everyone to a novice in the kitchen all the way to experienced chefs, and we allow them to test and give insight and feedback on the product,” says Marchewka. “Over the course of the two years of developing this, we continued to improve upon each product as we went along. So we really took a lot of feedback and spent a lot of time making sure that each one of these tools did what we set out for them to do to meet our standards when we started developing the line.”

The line of Crisp tools first debuted in the fall of 2014 with new additions unveiled at the International Home + Housewares Show this March. The latest additions to the line are set to roll out over for the next few months, including a Dual Juicer this month, a Garlic Press and Strawberry Slicer available in June, Citrus Squeezer in July, and an Apple Slicer in August.

All Crisp products are dishwasher safe and include a seven year warranty. Crisp tools range in price from $29.99 for a Citrus Squeezer to $7.99 for a Vegetable Brush. For more information, visit www.CrispCooking.com.

This story was originally published in the May 2015 issue of Kitchenware News, a publication of Oser Communications Group.