Kitchen Inventions: From Concept to Reality
What brilliant invention ideas are the U.K.'s brightest minds cooking up today that will change the way we prepare food in the kitchen?
Innovative Kitchen Gadgets Demand
Roughly 11% (or more) of all money spent by U.K. families each year goes towards purchases of food and/or non-alcoholic beverages according to the most recent "Family Food" report by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. With over 64 million people living in the U.K., this represents a lot of money spent on both eating out, and inevitably on cooking and feeding the family at home. Below are a few examples of famous inventions by Britons that have made life in the kitchen a little easier:
- The Metal Can: In 1810, Peter Durand, of London, England invented the metal can, or "tin", for preserving food for long periods of time.
- Refrigeration: The first viable methods of cooling air through the evaporation of liquids in a vacuum was invented in 1748 by William Cullen of the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
- The Sandwich: in 1762, John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was said to have no time to have a meal during his long hours playing at the card table, instead asking his servants to bring him a piece of meat between two slices of bread. The sandwich was thus born!
Kitchen Inventions Supported by Innovate
Multi Purpose Drying Caddy
One day whilst finishing the dishes in her kitchen and searching in vain for a place to store and dry her rubber gloves, Christine Daws came up with the concept of her multi-purpose drying caddy.
Christine then engaged with Innovate Product Design to patent and prototype her idea. Beginning in the Autumn of 2012, Innovate began working with Christine to create display boards, CAD drawings and other materials to assist the patent process. In early 2013, Christine was passed on to IPconsult to finalize her patent application and design registration. Today her product is sold by the UK retailer KitchenCraft, where customers have posted rave reviews about the innovative kitchen product.
SinkStation Colander
Even after the most delicious of meals, nobody enjoys fishing into the bowels of a murky, clogged sink to dislodge bits of vegetable peelings and food waste. Faced with this unenviable task one evening, Damon Meredith decided there had to be a better way of preventing waste from clogging up the plughole of the kitchen sink. Innovate Product Design assisted Damon with bringing his innovative kitchen gadget idea to reality by:
- Conducting a market analysis to assess demand
- Recommending the most suitable form of intellectual property protection
- Creating photorealistic CAD visualizations using design software
- Advising on routes to market fro his kitchen invention
- Supporting on-going development of the product once launched
Today the SinkStation is sold globally through a distributor and has won numerous awards for its simple ingenuity.