Scott Heimendinger on Reinventing the Chef's Knife with Ultrasonic Technology

This week on Chefs Without Restaurants, Chris Spear talks with inventor Scott Heimendinger, founder of Seattle Ultrasonics and co-founder of Sansaire. If you've ever cooked sous vide at home or followed Modernist Cuisine, there's a good chance you've used, or been influenced by, Scott's work. His latest project is the world's first ultrasonic chef's knife designed specifically for home cooks.

Chris and Scott discuss Scott's journey from Microsoft to the food world, what inspired him to spend six years developing an entirely new kind of chef's knife, and why he believes better kitchen tools aren't just about performance... they're about giving people more confidence to cook. They also dive into the realities of inventing hardware, bringing new technology to market, and what's next for ultrasonic kitchen tools.

Topics discussed:

• Scott's path from software engineer to food inventor
• The inspiration behind Seattle Ultrasonics
• How ultrasonic knives actually work
• Why reducing friction matters as much as sharpness
• Designing products that build confidence in home cooks
• Hardware development, firmware updates, and future innovations
• Advice for aspiring inventors and makers

SCOTT HEIMENDINGER
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Transcript

Scott Heimendinger – Seattle Ultrasonics

[00:00:00] Chris Spear: What if one of the oldest tools in the kitchen still had room for innovation? My guest today certainly thinks so. This is Chris Speir, and you're listening to Chefs Without Restaurants, the show where I speak with culinary entrepreneurs and people working in the food and beverage industry outside of a traditional restaurant setting.

[00:00:19] I have 32 years of working in kitchens, but not restaurants, and currently operate a personal chef service doing dinner parties in the Washington, DC area. Today, I'm talking with inventor Scott Heimendinger. If you've ever cooked sous vide at home or followed the world of modern culinary technology, there's a good chance you've come across his work.

[00:00:37] He's the co-founder of Sancere, one of the companies that helped make sous vide available for home cooks, worked as director of applied research and technical director at Modernist Cuisine, and later helped develop the Anova Precision Oven, bringing combi oven cooking out of the professional kitchens and into people's homes.

[00:00:55] Now he's taking on another kitchen staple, the chef's knife. After spending six [00:01:00] years developing what became the world's first ultrasonic chef's knife designed for home cooks, Scott joins me to talk about the technology behind it, what it was like bringing a completely new product category to market, and why he believes innovation isn't about adding technology for technology's sake.

[00:01:15] It's about helping people feel more confident in the kitchen. Whether you're a chef, a serious home cook, or someone who just enjoys hearing how new ideas come to life, I think you're really gonna enjoy this conversation Hey, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming on. 

[00:01:30] Scott Heimendinger: Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:31] Chris Spear: So for people who don't know, can I get a little bit of your background?

[00:01:35] You're a food, you know... Do you say food technologist? How do you self-identify? 

[00:01:40] Scott Heimendinger: Uh, I'm an inventor. Um, that's sort of my, the primary label that I give to myself. But I focus only on tools meant to help primarily home cooks feel the best they can about themselves in the kitchen. So real quick version of the background is I was originally [00:02:00] supposed to make software for a living.

[00:02:01] I went to college to, to learn how to do that, and then I worked for IBM and Microsoft. But while I was at Microsoft, uh, in the mid-2000s, just like everybody else, I started a food blog, and that was sort of my moonlighting nights and weekends thing, and it was completely unoriginal and whatever. Until I stumbled across sous vide cooking, which at that point was really only a small handful of the top chefs in the world and some nerds on forums like Egullet talking about this technique and trying to figure out what the times and temperatures were.

[00:02:36] And I-- This really appealed to the engineering side of my brain. So I wanted to cook sous vide, but then I discovered that everybody was using twelve hundred dollar laboratory immersion circulators. I decided to reverse engineer it and build my own. And I did, and that led to sort of an inflection point in my career.

[00:02:53] I left Microsoft to go work for Modernist Cuisine as the director of applied research [00:03:00] and then later as technical director. I also launched Sansaire, which was my first startup that I co-founded, and our whole goal was to make sous vide accessible to home cooks, break that twelve hundred dollar price point down to a two hundred dollar price point.

[00:03:15] I did that, had a, had a blast. Uh, I got recruited to work with Anova, who were my former sous vide competitors, and I helped them build the world's first home combi oven, the Anova Precision Oven, it was called. And it's... It was the first oven to do wet bulb control at a price point of $600 instead of starting price of $6,000 for, like, the rationales.

[00:03:38] Uh, anyway, in 2020, I started work on a new project. I left Modernist Cuisine, and I knew I wanted to do something new and something on my own, and that project, I didn't realize it was gonna take me six years to bring it to life, but that became Seattle Ultrasonics, which is the world's first ultrasonic chef's knife for home cooks.

[00:03:58] Chris Spear: Now, did you start out with the [00:04:00] knife as the project? Like, when you, you know, "Seattle Ultrasonics is my new project," were you totally set on the knife being the thing? 

[00:04:09] Scott Heimendinger: No. When I left Modernist Cuisine, I didn't know actually what I wanted to build. I just knew I wanted to build something. And this is gonna sound so cliché, but my wife and I went to a cabin on the river for a weekend, and I sat in the window and just filled a little notepad with ideas and notes and whatever.

[00:04:31] And then I systematically scratched off the ones that I didn't think would work. I knew, you know, I was gonna basically work from home. I wanted to do something that I could make without having to raise money, or certainly not have to raise a lot of money or build a team, and something that I could reasonably prototype with the resources that I had available.

[00:04:52] So, my idea for a, you know, a new type of refrigerator-freezer that made clear, spherical ice cubes or whatever, [00:05:00] that was straight out 'cause I couldn't prototype that here. Um, uh, but, but I couldn't scratch the knife off the list. It kept fitting all the criteria. And I wrote down a plan for how I was gonna develop the prototype, file the patents, and then go out and shop the idea to license it to companies that are gonna make things.

[00:05:20] And this whole process was gonna take me about six months. Uh, it took me six years to launch, and I brought it to market first party. 

[00:05:26] Chris Spear: Well, that's so impressive, though, because it's funny to me, I am not technical, I don't have these skills, and that this was the easy project. I mean, I've seen a lot of your tests along the way.

[00:05:36] Like, I have to rebuild my fence at my house, and I'm like, "I'm not sure I can rebuild this fence," which is just wood and nails, you know? And you're like, "Oh, well, it's an, you know, an ultrasonic knife. I can reasonably do that at home with my skills and no investors." That's a huge knowledge gap, I think, between you and most average people, wouldn't you say?

[00:05:56] Scott Heimendinger: Well, it turned out to be incredible [00:06:00] naivety. I ridiculously underestimated how hard the problem actually is. And it's a good thing too, because if I had known when I started how hard this would actually be, I would've run the other way screaming. I d- I would never have begun. Um, and I think a lot of things take that form.

[00:06:19] You know, it would never have been made if you knew how painful it was actually gonna be. So that, that, you know, I was, I was at the beginning of Naivety Mountain, and then kept finding new peaks along the way. 

[00:06:30] Chris Spear: Well, I think what's great is as, uh, technology in general speeds up, like sometimes you're able to do things now that you couldn't before, and that's why, like I always keep notebooks of ideas.

[00:06:40] I myself have something I want to potentially work on, and years ago I had no idea. But now as you get into 3D printing or using AI to help code something, you know, it seems more within reach, and I don't know that I'll be able to do it, but it seems so much more realistic than 12 years ago when I started putting ideas in a [00:07:00] notebook.

[00:07:00] You know? So it's fun when that stuff catches up. 

[00:07:03] Scott Heimendinger: It's a, that's a fantastic point. There's a, a term called the adjacent possible, and it's basically like- What's the horizon you've just reached of things that you can do now that a little while ago might not have been possible? So ultrasonic cutting tools, like ultrasonic cutters for food, have been around for decades.

[00:07:25] That-- The idea of cutting food with ultrasound isn't new. But those machines are enorm- I mean, the power supplies are, like, bigger than shoeboxes. They cost several thousand dollars. You know, a cheap one would be five grand. They're, they're-- You can't really operate them by hand. They're too heavy. So the idea of the adjacent possible was, okay, lithium batteries have gotten small enough and powerful enough that this could be a thing.

[00:07:52] Um, microcontrollers for actually, you know, controlling the routines that need to happen inside a device are cheap [00:08:00] enough, small enough, easy enough to program. Um, amplifier circuits, that's a big deal for something like this. Uh, these amplifier circuits didn't get cheap, uh, they're still not cheap, but they didn't get miniaturized so that I could make an ultrasonic knife.

[00:08:15] They got miniaturized for, like, Bluetooth boom boxes and, you know, all sorts of other cool stuff that I get to take advantage of. Those, those-- The parts became available if, um, if you wanted to kind of assemble that sort of thing. Now, unfortunately, six years ago, LLMs were not a thing, so all the coding was artisanal.

[00:08:39] You know, I was writing all this code by hand. Um, and, uh, a-and these tools that are, like, so useful today already were not available to help with the R&D process, to, like, help me figure out what does the circuitry need to look like, to help me with the calculations of [00:09:00] ultrasonic physics, and what should the proportions of this be, and how do I set up and run a simulation for a thousand different things that now I can, I can kinda work like a partner with these more sophisticated, um, AI tools and really speed up development.

[00:09:18] I had to do it all the slow way. So I think if I were starting again from scratch now, that six years might compress to two or three. 

[00:09:26] Chris Spear: Mm-hmm. Well, that's optimistic for people who want to start out a project some- you know, like this, and I might have to tap you on the shoulder at some point if I decide I'm gonna make the leap, and maybe we even talk about, you know, first steps for someone who's got something, um, on the horizon.

[00:09:41] Scott Heimendinger: I am more than happy to be a bad influence, uh, and encourage people to take those steps. 

[00:09:45] Chris Spear: Well, you know, I'm a working chef, so I've been in the kitchen for 30 years, and I think you see things that need improvement. The fact that you go into work every day and you have the same frustration with something, yet there's nothing that exists to fix that, [00:10:00] I think you are ripe for the opportunity to...

[00:10:03] You know, again, it's hard to be an inventor and create things, but when you go to a kitchen every day and you're like, "Why don't they make a mm that does this?" You know? After doing that for so many days, you're like, "Okay, maybe I just am the guy who tries to figure out how to do this." 

[00:10:18] Scott Heimendinger: That's cool. I really hope you do.

[00:10:20] I hope a lot of people do. Um, being an inventor is not easy, but we sort of, um... But I, but I want more people to help solve those types of problems. The chances are that if you're facing a problem like that, so are a lot of other people, and the only way to make it better is to do something about it. And yet, as we talked about a little bit just now, we live in the golden age of rapid prototyping.

[00:10:45] It has never been faster, easier, or cheaper to build- to bring an idea to life. Um, that's especially true if your idea is just software, but it's also true if it's software and hardware. 

[00:10:56] Chris Spear: Yeah. People who've listened to the show, and especially people who know me, know [00:11:00] that I am, I don't know if I'd say I'm the anti-knife guy, but it's one of the things I speak out about the most because I do feel like there's this huge world, especially in the chef world, of like knife porn.

[00:11:11] And listen, I love craftsmanship, I love artistry, but I see a lot of young cooks feeling like they have to get these custom-made, very expensive knives when I still use... I went to Johnson & Wales and graduated in '98. The knives they gave me in '94 that were the F.Dick's, still use them on a daily basis. I bought a block of Henckels Twin Stars in '97 from a line cook I worked with for 100 bucks, and they have held up.

[00:11:37] And I've bought inexpensive butchering-type knives, but I've never spent the money. And I say like, "My Hyundai goes the same place as your Lamborghini, they just look different." And that's how I feel about knives. So I feel like you've actually created something really exciting, very different. It's not just a different way of forging steel or creating a different handle or something.

[00:11:59] So, so I just [00:12:00] wanted to put that out there because people have probably seen me talk about like the don't buy the expensive custom knife. 

[00:12:07] Scott Heimendinger: I totally get it. Sort of like the best camera is the one you have with you, uh, the same is true of knives. And I think folks should use whatever tools make them happy, full stop.

[00:12:19] Um, knives are a really special category because There's value in the function that they provide, where that, that function you can measure objectively, and I've taken this a little bit to the extreme 'cause I also have a robot arm. But, um, you know, how well do they hold their edge? How sharp can you sharpen that edge?

[00:12:43] How resistant they are to chipping. You know, all the things that, that metallurgists are concerned with. But knives also have value for artistry and story and so on, and that's a thing that can affect the prices and perception of [00:13:00] knives, and I think that's totally valid. Um, it's not that different from wine.

[00:13:07] You know, y- the- you... Okay, th- this is made from Pinot Noir, and it has this percent alcohol, whatever, and do I enjoy drinking it? Uh, yes or no, or to what extent? This one is also made from Pinot Noir. It's got the exact same ABV, but the bottle is fancier. There's a story around the place that made it.

[00:13:29] There's whatever mythology or lineage or whatever. And those types of things literally can make you enjoy the experience of drinking that wine more. Like, l- your brain will light up in an fMRI more. And I presume the same is true of knives. If you are, you know, if you've bought some knife because you wanna support the craftsperson who made it, you believe in the artistry, you believe in the tradition, that makes you happy.

[00:13:55] That is awesome. That is also not at all [00:14:00] what I am focused on. Um, I'll let, I'll let the people who are great at that craft focus on that, and I think it's wonderful. And I actually, I love knives like that. I w- I, we, we were in Japan in, uh, last fall. I went to Sakai City. I went to the shop of this maker who's, like, fifth generation, and he's standing in a hole in the ground, pounding glowing orange metal with the hammer.

[00:14:24] The rest of the shop looks like it hasn't been touched since 1880. Made beautiful stuff. I got to pick out my blade and my handle and watch them, uh, you know, couple them together. It's a really nice piece. Uh, I had a great experience. I love that. Does it cut better than a knife that is a fraction of the price?

[00:14:44] No. Uh, but, but I, but I love it for that reason. I'm taking m- a very different approach to knives than those folks are. Um, the way I see it, [00:15:00] knives have improved over the last five generations of humans quite a bit, but that improvement is invisible to a lot of folks. So right now you can walk into any cooking store and buy a knife for $100, $200 that is way better than the best knife you could possibly buy 100 years ago.

[00:15:25] Um, all knives were non-stainless, right? So like that, that was an invention. That was a, a development that drove the, the quality or capability of knives forward. And since then, there have been 100 much smaller, much more subtle developments in... that metallurgists have done to figure out, how do I get this balance of sharpness and durability and the ability to resharpen easily and so on?

[00:15:53] And the performance of knives or the quality of knife you could get per dollar has steadily risen in [00:16:00] the last 120 years, something like that. The problem is that that is plateauing, that all of the advancements that are happening today in the so-called super steels that knife nerds really, really love, those advancements now come at a really high price, not just literally the dollars you're paying, but they require exotic equipment to produce the blades, vacuum ovens, and special cryo treatment.

[00:16:27] The metal is so much harder that it wears your tools out in the process of making these knives, or it takes you forever to resharpen to reestablish an edge 'cause it's a really hard metal. So there are these huge trade-offs So I wonder, is there a way to make the next generation's knives perform better than the prior generation's knives if we're plateaued out on metallurgy?

[00:16:55] Like, I, I'm very unsatisfied by the [00:17:00] idea that knives just stop getting better, right? That would, that would, would drive me crazy. And so my thought was, well, if I wanna help advance the state of the art, I gotta do something different. Uh, I have to, have to take a different approach. I'm also not a metallurgist, so I can't really contribute there.

[00:17:17] Um, I came across these videos on YouTube of commercial ultrasonic food cutters. Have you ever seen these machines? 

[00:17:24] Chris Spear: Um, only... So is that what you're sharing on your Instagram where it's like these giant things cutting down? 'Cause I did look at those. So that's the only time I've seen that. 

[00:17:33] Scott Heimendinger: Yeah. If, if, uh, if you haven't seen one, it sorta looks like a big fat guillotine blade.

[00:17:39] It's got some slots cut in it. It's connected to this big piece of metal. They're big, they're really heavy, like they can be too heavy to hold by hand. But when you go into Costco and you get the pre-sliced cheesecake or mozzarella log, or even shokupan or whatever, chances are those were cut using one of these [00:18:00] devices.

[00:18:01] And the reason that they exist, the reason that they're used, is they don't rely on a sharp blade like a knife does. A sharp blade will wear out. All sharp blades wear out. And if you're running a machine 24/7, it's gonna wear out pretty fast, and then you spend like so much time in maintenance. These machines don't rely on a sharp blade.

[00:18:22] They rely on pumping an incredible amount of ultrasonic energy through that kind of guillotine-like cutting head, and it prevents food from sticking to it. So in the, you know, the Little Debbie factory where they're, they're cutting like sticky snack cakes and, you know, g- and, and granola bars, and all this stuff that will stick to any blade, they don't stick to these because of that ultrasonic energy.

[00:18:48] So I saw that and, and it... Like, it really does look like magic. Like, you can smear cream cheese on the side of one of these things and turn it on, and it just falls off like rain [00:19:00] cascading down a window. It's so 

[00:19:01] Chris Spear: cool. Well, just last night I was, um, I needed to cut Chevre cheese for a dish, and it didn't wor- you know, it's, it does what it does.

[00:19:08] It crumbles and then it like mushes out, and I wanted like a nice disc, and the, just the reality is you're almost never gonna get a nice disc of Chevre from a log with a traditional knife unless you like maybe par freeze it a little bit 

[00:19:20] Scott Heimendinger: Yeah, or do some other workaround, like you're using dental floss instead of...

[00:19:25] But like, if you're doing production, you know, switching to dental floss is... Anyway, um, I really wanted to, to take the magic that I saw in those commercial cutter blades and shrink it down and get some of that benefit in a regular chef's knife that was shaped like a chef's knife, that you could hold in a pinch grip, that you could, like, rinse under the sink and, and just treat like a normal knife.

[00:19:52] But then, with the touch of a button, pick up some of these enhanced kind of magical capabilities. So [00:20:00] that's what set me on this whole path is, is this idea that maybe we can make knives better by adapting this technology that has already been proven in commercial industries, and just shrinking it down for the first time into a form factor that home cooks could use.

[00:20:18] Chris Spear: So where do you even start? Like, what is, for this specific thing, what is the first thing you have to work on 

[00:20:26] Scott Heimendinger: There's a quote, I think it's a Thomas Edison quote, that, uh, says, "To invent, you need a great imagination and a pile of junk." So the first thing I did was I got a pile of junk. Uh, I bought, I bought a bunch of, you know, ultrasonic cleaning transducers and parts and things that I could take apart and try to figure out, you know, how do you make ultrasonics go?

[00:20:46] Um, it's very different than driving a motor, like wildly different. It's very different than driving a speaker, even though all of these things have something in common. And so I had a lot of learning to do, slapping together parts [00:21:00] and just trying to get some output out of it. So that was the first thing I did, was I just naively bought a bunch of stuff and connected it up and said, "Can I make anything go?"

[00:21:08] Chris Spear: Had you ever played with the ultrasonic homogenizer? I think that's my only experience with ultrasonics, is, uh, Dave Arnold was doing something with it, and then he... I don't know if he pulled it out of whatever, and it made this squeak- squealing sound that is still in my brain from 10 years ago that, you know, gave me an instant migraine.

[00:21:26] Scott Heimendinger: Yes. I, I have played with that one and used it to, like, make mayonnaise and d- you know, do, do all sorts of fun experiments. Um, that is similar in principle. You know, it's got the, kind of the same engine in it. Uh, it's, it's driven by piezo, uh, electric ceramic discs that get this high-power signal and convert that into motion.

[00:21:50] Um, and similarly, uh, ultrasonic cutters, ultrasonic homogenizers, ultrasonic welders, ultrasonic cleaning baths, all, all this kind of stuff [00:22:00] is based on this principle of vibration that happens really small in amplitude, right? Like, you can't see the, the movement back and forth with the naked eye. It's too small.

[00:22:12] But it happens at extremely high frequency. So it's happening over and over again really, really fast, and with a lot of power or a lot of energy going into the thing. So, um, on these ultrasonic knives, including my knife- It's not like a reciprocating saw where you're moving the whole saw blade back and forth or like a, like a jigsaw.

[00:22:32] You know, it's a, like- Like grand- like granddad's, uh, 

[00:22:34] Chris Spear: turkey cutting knife? 

[00:22:36] Scott Heimendinger: Exactly, yeah. It is, it is not moving like granddad's turkey cutter where you're, you're driving this whole blade back and forth like a Theragun. Um, you're actually sending a shockwave of energy into the metal, and that wave is so powerful that it causes the metal itself to expand and contract.

[00:22:58] You're causing steel to [00:23:00] expand and contract just by a tiny amount, not enough that it creates stress issues or cracks or fractures in the steel. They're, they're meant to do this. But sort of like when you tap a tuning fork, you know, and, and the metal is vibrating, that kind of idea, but where you're controlling those vibrations.

[00:23:17] I thought 

[00:23:17] Chris Spear: it was interesting. I've seen a lot of videos on this, and you, you can't tell. I mean, maybe if you had it in front of you, but I don't think you can, right? But like, you know, it's off and then it's on, and it just looks the same. 

[00:23:30] Scott Heimendinger: Yep. It, it looks the same to the naked eye. When you're holding my knife by the handle, there's no vibration in the handle.

[00:23:37] It's not like your electric toothbrush. Um, you can feel it, uh, if you rub your fingers along the edge of the blade while it's on, not the cutting edge, but just to the sides on the belly. You can feel... It feels like turning an air hockey table on and off. Um, that reduced friction you get by touching the surface that's in [00:24:00] motion.

[00:24:00] It's a, it's a really bizarre feeling that we don't have kind of an everyday frame of 

[00:24:04] Chris Spear: reference for. Does the whole blade have that, or does it somehow move it down just towards the bottom part? Or like, if you touch the top, can you feel it vibrating up there? 

[00:24:13] Scott Heimendinger: Great question. Um, the top doesn't vibrate as much, and the reason is that, you know, at the...

[00:24:19] If you look from spine to edge, a blade is, is shaped like a wedge. The amplitude of the energy goes with the cross-sectional area. So in other words, as the material gets narrower, the amplitude of the energy, uh, goes up. Kind of like the same reason that a bullwhip comes to a taper, you know, to make the end go really fast.

[00:24:42] Same sort of idea. So the energy really does get concentrated down towards the cutting edge. And then you, you feel it with your fingers. It's sort of on and off, on and off in, in spots along the blade, and that's because you have a standing wave that's happening. And in [00:25:00] every standing wave, there are nodes where everything is still, and then antinodes where everything is moving.

[00:25:05] Chris Spear: I love seeing innovation like this in kitchens, but specifically for home cooks. You know, I take for granted, I think, my cooking skill. I'm a personal chef. I'm in people's homes multiple times a week. And people are scared to cook. They're unsure of themself in the kitchen, and I just think, like, having a few tools and a few recipes that can kind of give them that confidence.

[00:25:29] I mean, knife skills, I just think of my mom and taking, like, 20 minutes to cut one onion. It's like, uh, if you could just, like, speed up that process, I think you'd feel a lot more comfortable cooking 

[00:25:41] Scott Heimendinger: I, I, you totally nailed it. Um, really everything that I've worked on professionally has been a way of trying to make people feel confident in their own home kitchens.

[00:25:56] A sous vide machine, d- from my perspective, [00:26:00] y- yeah, it, it's a machine that keeps water at the right temperature, but really it's a machine that turns anxiety into confidence, right? You bought that prime rib roast, which was a giant chunk of change, and now you're about to cut into it for the first time in front of your whole family at, you know, New Year's Eve dinner or whatever.

[00:26:20] That's a really anxious moment to know is it undercooked? Is it overcooked? Right? You don't know what's gonna happen. Sous vide made that so predictable that you could kinda like, you know, no hands shoot the ball, uh, 'cause you always knew that it was gonna come out totally perfect. I am a home cook. I am not a professional chef.

[00:26:40] Even though I worked at Modernist Cuisine, I didn't work in the kitchen. Um, I'm a fine home cook. You know, I've got a bunch of friends who've got better knife skills than I do who are, who are better home cooks than I do, than I am. Um, but I see my, uh, the opportunity I have is to create the tools that help [00:27:00] cooks feel better about themselves, feel more confident.

[00:27:03] I believe that in some tiny little way, the whole world gets better the more people enjoy cooking at home. Well, 

[00:27:08] Chris Spear: and going back to me cooking for people, on the opposite end, I do have people who are, in some respects, I feel like more advanced than me, especially on niche things, right? Like, you're seeing the...

[00:27:18] Like, pizza is a great example. Now that we have baking steels and Oonis and all that, I go to people's houses and I'm not doing pizza, but then they'll like wanna talk about that, or smoking and like, you know, ratcheting in their whole thing. So that's exciting, and it's once they get this one tool, they got their Big Green Egg or they got their new, you know, whatever, and then they just nerd out on that.

[00:27:40] So there's definitely this rise. And sometimes I'm like, "That's outside my wheelhouse. Like, I do okay on pizza, but it sounds like you got pizza on lock. Like, I can't give you any tips 

[00:27:50] Scott Heimendinger: Yeah, I love that stuff. I think it's so cool to go down rabbit holes. I'm, I'm guilty of some of these. Pizza and smoking are two of the ones that I'm definitely, [00:28:00] uh, you know, p- practice and refine and dial in, and then it feels great to have guests over and be able to do pizzas with confidence or serve a smoked chicken with confidence.

[00:28:11] Chris Spear: I wanna talk about the handle because that's what I hear the most from when I talk to people about knives, especially when I say like, "I'm, you know, I would never spend that on a knife." And what people say is, "But it's the handle," you know? Or I'll say like, "I use this knife," and they'll say, "Well, I don't like that 'cause I don't like the handle."

[00:28:26] So clearly you're making a knife that has to have a universal handle. How do you decide, especially for a home cook, like, what the handle's gonna look like? Plus also, you have a lot of other things going on with the handle than just, you know, what it's crafted from on the outside. 

[00:28:44] Scott Heimendinger: Yeah. For everybody else, uh, making knives, the handle is an aesthetic decision, right?

[00:28:52] It can look like whatever you want. It can be whatever size you prefer. It could be as thin as a chopstick, it could be as wide as a baseball [00:29:00] bat. That's up to you. For me, I actually have to put stuff in the handle, and I have to put a lot of stuff in the handle. So I'm, I'm showing you this on video now.

[00:29:10] This is my handle. It is large as knife handles go. There, there's no way around that. Um, it is not as big as some people think. So I've got medium sized hands here, and you can see that everything kind of fits comfortably. Um, but the next size up in electronics and systems that run ultrasonics are the size of a shoebox.

[00:29:35] So inside my handle, I have a circuit board that is folded on itself twice to have six layers to use up all the 3D space, uh, to try to get the handle even this small. Um, the battery pack here has to, you know, not only be insertable and hold the largest battery that we can get away with, but it also has to be waterproofed [00:30:00] and connected in here.

[00:30:01] And so the design of the, the handle that is on my knife was driven basically by the inside out. How small could we possibly shrink the guts of this thing, which has tremendously complex circuit boards, and then wrap the handle around and still make this, uh, kind of useful? Now, amazingly, the balance point on my knife is right here at the bolster, e- exactly where you'd expect it to be on any knife.

[00:30:31] And the design of the button, and this went through, you know, dozens and dozens of rounds of prototyping and ideation or whatever, is such that if you wanna use the sort of hammer grip on your knife, you can reach it with a finger. If you wanna use a pinch grip, you can al- you'll-- There's always a finger that you can just touch right on that button, and you're good to go, and it's nicely balanced.

[00:30:50] It's on the heavier side, not as heavy as a meat cleaver, but a little heavier than my heaviest chef's knife, which is a Kramer by Zwilling, which is a, a larger, [00:31:00] heavier knife But, and so I'm sympathetic anytime somebody's like, "Yeah, the handle's big," or, "Yeah, it's a little heavy." Um, except that like, come on, man, like this is stepped down from 20 pounds and a shoebox, so please like grant a little grace to how much uh, uh, we have, we have gone here.

[00:31:20] But I also recognize that like handles are a very personal thing. Like what feels right to you? Just like, you know, what kind of shoe feels good on your foot or whatever. That can be a, a really highly personal sort of thing. I hope in the future to be able to shrink my handle even more, to be able to lighten up on how much it weighs and whatever.

[00:31:43] I am a little bit at the mercy of just what is the boundary of what's physically possible. So a lot, a lot of work went into this, making sure it's strong enough. 

[00:31:55] Chris Spear: One of the things that I always think about is I see something like [00:32:00] this, and then I wanna get it, especially on the early end, but then I feel like then successively the next gens come, and then it's like I spent a decent amount of money for something that's now not the best, and it...

[00:32:10] always figuring out the point. It's, it's the same with the phone. It's like, "Oh, okay, I'm gonna get the best phone," and then literally after I buy it, like four weeks later, the new one comes out and I already have the, is it FOMO or what happen, you know, whatever it is. And I, you know, I've seen it with circulators and all those things.

[00:32:25] So how do you, how do you think about that as both the person designing, but also the customer, like that they're gonna feel happy with what they buy, knowing that you're probably gonna have another gen that has better battery life or a stronger blade or something coming down the pike? 

[00:32:43] Scott Heimendinger: Yeah. This is a, a sort of a natural part of how technology does or evolves.

[00:32:50] Everything that you just said is, is true, and I do hope in the future to have... To, to make everything better. Stronger, faster, lighter, cheaper. That's [00:33:00] definitely the goal. It was really important to me though, that I'm shipping a product that I think will last people a long time. It's not something that I, like-- Everything I make, like, I want you to use it forever.

[00:33:16] It makes me so happy when people come up to me and they're like, "You know, I still got a Sanze that's, like, still kicking after all these years." That is so cool. I'm really not interested in trying to earn repeat business by making a thing that then, like, stops being good in a short while. Like, screw that.

[00:33:34] I would rather make more things. I would rather make the nakiri, and the santoku, and the bread knife, and the slicer, and earn your repeat business by you wanting to buy more SKUs than wanting to buy the same product over and over again. Um, the other thing, though, is in the way that I have shaped my business.

[00:33:57] A venture capital-backed [00:34:00] company would go like, "Okay, cool. We've got a tech knife product. Now we need to charge people a subscription for it, and then, you know, we need to, like, make it obsolete two years from now and, and whatever," because that's the only way that they get to these, like, enormous revenue numbers.

[00:34:16] I built the company a different way. I did take a small round of investment from angel investors as sort of a, a seed round, 'cause I needed money to get to production. But my business doesn't require scaling, like, a venture capital thing in order f- for me to keep working on this. What does... What is required though are early adopters who want to help support the idea and who want to use the product.

[00:34:46] A lot of these folks recognize that, you know, in a couple years, yeah, maybe there will be a next gen. But buying the first gen is the fuel that I need as an inventor to be able to make the second gen. [00:35:00] I recognize that dynamic. It makes me incredibly loyal to my earliest customers. I really wanna move heaven and earth to make those customers happy.

[00:35:10] If something has gone wrong, whatever, um, uh, it is, it is personally meaningful. Every single order that comes in, um, I see with my own eyes. I've got a Vesta board in the other room, and it flips over and goes, you know, John Smith ordered a knife for this whatever. Every single one is meaningful, means a lot to me, and I wanna take care of these folks in return because they're the people who are allowing the next generation of progress to happen.

[00:35:38] Chris Spear: Yeah. That-- I think that's really cool because it, it is like you said before, quite often some of these companies, they're on like three gens in a year and a half or something like that, and I'm always like, "Oh, um, you know, what am I missing out? I would've loved to have that extra thing that it does, and it's only $50 more than what I already paid."

[00:35:59] I don't wanna [00:36:00] downplay it, but like, I don't know how many advancements you would have. Like, if it... I, again, I've had knives like 30 years, right? So if it's got a sharp blade and it cuts and does the job, uh, I think for... It would probably be battery life. Like, I think that's the thing with all of these tech things now, right?

[00:36:14] It's like I've got-- I loved my electric lawnmower for the first year, and now the battery, I can get half the lawn done, and by the way, a new battery's $400, which is essentially the cost of the whole lawnmower in the first place. And you're like, "That was great, but I just don't get the battery life that I used to."

[00:36:32] Scott Heimendinger: Totally, uh, completely get it. Um, and this is, uh, un-unfortunately just a challenge with lithium battery cells is that they get, uh, they degrade over time. We-- I tried to pick cells that have the best lifetime curves and whatever. I- a-and we sell replacement battery packs. I really don't want to sell you a replacement battery.

[00:36:54] Like, that is not the intention. I want you to have one battery, and I want it to last a really, really long time. But it's funny you [00:37:00] bring that up about, you know, what, what advancements really could happen. Um, this is the, the only home chef's knife that has firmware on it, right? There's code that runs on the knife, and we've been able to find improvements after we shipped about ways to bring the knife into tune, uh, faster, better, more stably, and even ways to decrease the power consumption when the knife is off, so your battery lasts longer.

[00:37:29] We've already shipped some of those updates. We're getting ready r-r-- as, as we're recording right now, we're getting ready to ship another one in about a week that's gonna help standby time quite a bit. And you can take your knife and any phone or computer, you don't have to install an app. You go to the website, and it transfers the new firmware wirelessly, and now your knife has gotten better for free.

[00:37:53] Um, so that's a, that's a cool thing to do. I wish that I had just gotten all the code completely a hundred percent [00:38:00] optimized when we shipped, but it's kinda neat to be able to make your product get better for free after you bought it. Oh, absolutely. I have an 

[00:38:04] Chris Spear: Oura Ring, and it's the same thing. I've had it for, like, four years now, and then all of a sudden now it's like I can...

[00:38:09] it can sense this thing, or it has better, like, tracking on how far you walk, and I haven't had to buy a new one. You just get a thing on the app, and the firmware updates, and now it tracks your breathing or whatever, or you get better step, you know, better step recognition or something. 

[00:38:25] Scott Heimendinger: Totally. One more example is, so in, on the circuit board inside the knife, there is an accelerometer and gyroscope chip, right?

[00:38:33] So the same thing that your phone has, the sort of motion sensor to know if you're portrait or landscape or whatever. And I'm not doing much with that chip right now, but in the future, if I can get around to it, I can help you determine if you're holding the knife at the right angle to your sharpening stone, uh, so that you don't have to guess, or that you get kind of visual feedback in real time about the angle that you're resharpening to, for instance.

[00:38:58] And that's a, [00:39:00] that's a thing that can just kinda get cool and better over time. Um, and it's kinda neat. Now, that is all beside the point. All the connected stuff, like I'm not... I hate when I have to pull out my phone to use something in the kitchen. I, I'm personally, I'm disgusted by all of that. And so the scenarios I'm talking about are like the one-offs, right?

[00:39:21] Like, oh, you know, every couple months maybe I'd, I'd update to get the latest and greatest firmware, or I'm doing a maintenance task, and it can be a little better if I have a screen involved. But it was important to me that in order to use this knife, all you do is push a button. That's it. There's nothing that has to be connected.

[00:39:37] You don't have to register. There's no subscription. There's no... It doesn't pair to Wi-Fi. You just push the- I 

[00:39:44] Chris Spear: love that ... freaking 

[00:39:44] Scott Heimendinger: button. 

[00:39:45] Chris Spear: Um, so I wanna talk about the sharpening because you've clearly made this for home cooks. I think that's, even for some professional chefs, one of the scariest things. Like, you know, do I use a stone?

[00:39:56] Is it a tri-stone? You know, a lot of people have the electric thing that [00:40:00] grinds off the edge. If you're expecting home cooks to be using this, um, talk about what the sharpening process looks like. 

[00:40:10] Scott Heimendinger: Most home cooks' knives are dull, right? Like, you, you know this. You go into other people's homes and kitchens, and I'm sure you bring your own cutlery with you.

[00:40:20] I, I 

[00:40:20] Chris Spear: bring my own, yep. 

[00:40:21] Scott Heimendinger: Of course. And for, for anybody listening going like, "Oh, well, you know, my knives at home are sharp," cool, you're the outlier. Think about the knives at the last Airbnb you stayed at, right? That represents the average of the world. So I designed my knife for people whose knives were probably last sharp on their wedding registry.

[00:40:43] Um, uh, and, and for, for folks who may never resharpen this knife. Now, it's made of knife steel. It's made of Japanese AUS10, which is a very nice knife steel. But it's not, it's not... It doesn't somehow break the [00:41:00] laws of physics. It's not like it doesn't benefit from resharpening. You can and should resharpen it just like any other knife.

[00:41:07] But even if you don't, even if you're a home cook who never resharpens this knife, there is still a benefit to the ultrasonics. When you, when you push the button and turn it on, the blade behaves sharper than it physically is at any level of physical sharpness. So when it comes straight from the factory, it's quite sharp, and it goes from quite sharp to, like, insanely sharp in the right points on the blade.

[00:41:31] But if you let it get dull, it goes from dull to less dull when you turn it on. But the s- the second part, going back to, like, the goat cheese example you brought up, if you're cutting ch- cheese, for instance, it doesn't really... The cheese doesn't care how sharp your knife is, right? That's not the problem.

[00:41:51] The problem is stickiness on the sides of the blade, that, that, uh, food release. And regardless of edge sharpness, the ultrasonics still [00:42:00] improve the food release on the sides of the blade always. And it turns out that that friction on the sides of the blade is a lot of the force required to cut through foods.

[00:42:12] Not just a block of cheese, but even when you're completing the cut in a potato or a carrot or something, it's not so much the cutting edge doing the work, it's the rest of the geometry of the blade and that friction. So there is some sustained benefit even if the knife gets dull. Now, it's not gonna go from dull to, like, mega ultra, you know, hair whittling sharp just 'cause you turned on the ultrasonics.

[00:42:38] It's a boost. It's, it's not magic. So it's designed sort of with all of that in mind. And, you know, and I, I don't-- I really wanna make sure that I'm not- Overstating how much the ultrasonics boost. It is a boost, but it's like an e-bike, it's not like a lightsaber, right? You're not gonna all of a sudden cut through your wood cutting [00:43:00] board, or be able to use exactly zero force to finish off these foods, but there is a benefit.

[00:43:06] It's kind of like having the wind at your back, and you kind of get used to that, and it's nice. 

[00:43:10] Chris Spear: And what do you think is the best way for especially a home cook to sharpen them? Like, do you have a favorite method or product to sharpen that's not you have to be this insane knife person now and have, like, all kinds of gear and stones and oils and stuff?

[00:43:28] Scott Heimendinger: Totally. I, you know, I think that almost anything is better than nothing at all, right? Like, almost anything you do to maintain your knives is great. Even if you only have a honing rod, which is not sharpening, it's just sort of straightening out the last little bit of metal at the edge, which I'm sure all your listeners know already.

[00:43:46] But- Hopefully ... but most home cooks don't. The, the one thing I would say is maybe not better than nothing are the pull-through sharpeners, where you've got this kind of V wedge and you're, you're just dragging the blade through [00:44:00] it. Those can do a lot of damage. They can make your knife feel sharper for, like, 10 seconds because they put this big burr on the edge of the blade.

[00:44:10] But that burr wears off, and you're just eating material, right? They, they, they... It's a really blunt instrument for- We 

[00:44:17] Chris Spear: had a, we had a, um, knife sharpening company, and I'm sure that's what they did. Like, it ... And you would start with, like, a chef's knife, and at some point it'd start to look like a boning knife.

[00:44:27] Like, you knew it was legitimately, like, a chef's knife, and then it comes as, like, this is no longer a chef's knife. Like, this is, like, a, a filet knife, boning knife type situation. 

[00:44:36] Scott Heimendinger: Yep. I have seen those knives in sort of the parents' collections that have just been progressively more and more eaten away. I think if you're a home cook and you wanna start dipping your toe in, start with a, uh, a wet stone that's just got a coarse grit on one side and a fine grit on the other.

[00:44:56] Go to YouTube and search for, like, Bob [00:45:00] Kramer knife sharpening, and he's got a, a short video that shows you kind of all the essentials. Uh, it's really popular, and he explains it very well. Um, and for, you know- 25 to $40. Now you've got a way to maintain your knives. 

[00:45:17] Chris Spear: So what is, uh... I mean, you just launched this, but what's next?

[00:45:22] Like, where are you at with both this and is there anything else you're looking at, or are you just gonna be refining the knife for a while? 

[00:45:30] Scott Heimendinger: All of the above. I am working on refinements to the knife. You know, we've-- So we, we publicly launched in September and opened for pre-orders, and that was great. We sold out in about 60 days of our first production run.

[00:45:42] Those first customers have their knives now, which is really exciting, so we've been getting feedback from folks and whatever. There's 100 little improvements that we're making, things we found from the field where we can, you know, make small changes to make the product better, w- working on updating [00:46:00] firmware to eke the best performance possible out of all the knives, and supply chain things and tariff things and, you know, running a hardware business is really complicated.

[00:46:10] So doing all of that stuff The plan was never just knives, although it will probably be just knives for a while. But I've have prototypes of ultrasonic ice cream scoop and other tools. I think about the sort of sonification of the kitchen, and is it possible to make a ultrasonic microplane that actually releases garlic shavings instead of them being stuck to the underside?

[00:46:36] So those things are on the horizon, but knives is gonna be it for a little while. A lot of my time is also spent just trying to educate the world on this. It's a, it's a really new thing. It, um, you know, in the world of knives, you'll find that people have really baked in preferences and beliefs, right?[00:47:00] 

[00:47:00] Thou shalt always do this, and you shalt not do that, whatever. And sometimes those beliefs are based in objective science. Sometimes that's 'cause what somebody taught you and it stuck or whatever. And, uh, rightfully so, a bunch of people's first reaction to the idea of an ultrasonic knife is, you know, "Oh, that sounds like a gimmick," or, you know, "You're just trying to," whatever, "separate me from my money or pass something off."

[00:47:29] And so it's my responsibility to show and prove, right? To say, "This is where the technology came from. Here's what it's good for. It's not good for everything. It's not a miracle, you know, thing that's, you know, that's, that's gonna make... You can't make a dull knife behave am- amazing just 'cause you put ultrasonics on it.

[00:47:47] But here are the benefits, and here's why this might be the way forward for progress in knives." That's a big education lift, and so I'm trying to figure out the right way to help [00:48:00] people understand the benefits and not turn them off, um, because it's new, and the world of knives is very steeped in old tradition.

[00:48:08] Chris Spear: And I don't know if you've thought about kids at all. You know, like I think-- So I have twins. They are gonna be 14 this summer. You know, we've always had them cook at home. You start off with these like blades that have literally no sharpness, right? These little things. But then, you know, I'm, I'm watching them, and I'm trying to teach them how to properly cut, but the force with which they have to really push through.

[00:48:29] And like I know when to like push and when to like not give it as much, and just watching them cut into some of those, like as you get into root vegetables and things, it's like I really think it would be great to have something that they can get in and use. And I think you'd see kids starting at a much younger age, because that's really where I'm having trouble with them in the kitchen.

[00:48:51] And both of my kids have started working with me. They come out on jobs, and there's only certain things I can give them to do. And my daughter now has started her own cottage bakery. [00:49:00] You know, so there is some cutting involved. So I'm trying to get them comfortable with knives, but I definitely am always around when they're using them because it's just a huge hazard.

[00:49:09] I mean, I don't need them cutting a finger off. 

[00:49:12] Scott Heimendinger: Totally. Yeah. I, uh, I support a one knife per child policy. Uh, you know, every kid needs a knife. I also support a, uh, end with the same number of fingers you started with policy. 

[00:49:26] Chris Spear: Yeah, that's a, that's a good way to go. Yes. Um, but it would be a really cool story, you know, if they were like 40 years old and missing a pinky.

[00:49:34] Well, thanks again. And as always, this is Chris with Chefs Without Restaurants. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great week.