Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S7E4 Scott Heimendinger | Developing the World’s First Home-Kitchen Ultrasonic Chef’s Knife
Scott Heimendinger is an engineer and inventor whose career spans business intelligence at Microsoft and IBM, to cutting-edge food-tech innovation. Early in his career he served as a program manager at Microsoft, then pivoted into culinary science, co-founding the pioneering sous-vide company Sansaire, which raised over $823 K via Kickstarter to make sous-vide accessible to home cooks.
He then moved into roles of increasing technical depth: at Modernist Cuisine he developed robotics, motion-control systems, microscopy, visual engineering and more; at Anova he led the development of the Anova Precision Oven — a home-focused combi-oven blending steam, air-flow and sensors. Today, with Seattle Ultrasonics, he’s tackling the humble chef’s knife: by embedding ultrasonic vibrations (over 40,000 Hz) and rigorous testing (including a robot-arm slicing experiment producing 100,000 data points) he’s redefining what it means to “cut better” in the kitchen.
For this episode we’ll dive into Scott’s journey bridging engineering and food, the technical story behind the ultrasonic knife (including prototyping, testing, failures and design iterations), and how a leader like him shepherds innovation from concept through to product launch. For engineers interested in product development, instrumentation, design-for-manufacturing and the crossover into consumer goods — this is one you won’t want to miss.
LINKS:
Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottheimendinger/
Guest website: https://seattleultrasonics.com/
Aaron Moncur, host
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I went out and I shopped the idea, and I got the best response you could possibly hope for from big companies whose names you would recognize. They loved it, and I did a deal with one of these companies, and it felt like victory. It was going to put a life changing amount of money in my pocket, and literally in the 11th Hour, like they just didn't sign their half of the DocuSign.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to another riveting episode of The being an engineer podcast today we have Scott hymendinger, a veteran at the intersection of culinary science and engineering, formerly Chief Innovation Officer at ANOVA culinary and director of Applied Research at Modernist Cuisine. Scott now leads Seattle ultrasonics, where he's developing the world's first ultrasonic chef's knife for home cooks, bringing high tech and precision into the kitchen, Scott, thank you so much for being with us on the show today. Thanks for having me so I don't know who it was your publicist or someone emailed me, introducing you, pitching you as a guest on the show. And I get a lot of these pitches right, and, like a lot of them, honestly, aren't a very good fit. And I was like, Oh, another one. Okay, who is this? And was reading through, I was like, what ultrasonic chef's knife? That's cool. Heard of one of those? We use ultrasonics for a variety of things, but never, never in a knife. I know there are industrial uses for ultrasonic cutting, but I've never heard of such a thing in like, you know, a home chef's knife right in the kitchen and home. So I thought this was a really neat technology, and we'll dive into it, of course. But let's start with, how did you get into culinary science and food technology?
Scott Heimendinger:Well, it wasn't my original career path. I was supposed to make software for a living, and I did for a while. I went to college to learn how to make software, and then I went to work for IBM and Microsoft, straight out of school, working on business intelligence software and basically being ridiculously good at Microsoft Excel. But this was the mid 2000s and so just like everybody else at that time, I started a food blog, and it was really just a way to track and share, you know, the sort of boring, normal stuff that I was cooking at home and and I learned a little bit photography and that kind of thing. But then through the course of doing this, I discovered that there was this sort of movement that was cooking like an engineer, not just treating cooking from the art perspective, but bringing a scientific lens to understand how to make cooking processes better. And this, I'm not talking about how to make industrial food. You know, this is not how to make a chicken nugget, but this is about understanding how heat transfers through food and things of that nature. And that just totally hooked the engineering side of my brain and and then my career took a big, hard pivot.
Aaron Moncur:What was that like? So you were presumably successfully gainfully employed right working at Microsoft, IBM, and then all of a sudden, no, I'm gonna pivot and just work on food science, like, where was it? Was it challenging for you to make that decision, or was it a super easy choice? Were you nervous? Were you scared? How did you convince yourself to make that leap?
Scott Heimendinger:So once I sort of went down the rabbit hole of this engineering, sort of science approach to cooking. I found some friends who were also into the same thing, and we would get together at nights or weekends and kind of have these culinary jam sessions. And we were, you have to remember, this is mid 2000 so we were experimenting with, like, how do we make Parmesan cheese foam, or, how do we do spherification or and sous vide was a really, a really big one. Sous vide was new on the scene. For folks that aren't familiar with it, sous vide cooking is cooking with a temperature controlled water bath so that your food is cooked in an environment that is the temperature you want it to reach. And it's a thing chefs had been doing, but at this time, there were no home tools for it, you could buy a used laboratory immersion circulator for $1,200 and then hope that it didn't have Ebola on it. And so I'd get together with my buddies, and we were trying to explore all this space in a DIY fashion. And then I read a New York Times article that there was this modernist quiz. Zine lab run by Nathan meervold, who is the former chief technology officer at Microsoft. And they were doing the like, full size reel version of all this stuff we were playing with in my basement. And they happened to be in Bellevue Washington, which is just basically across the street from downtown Seattle, and my manager at Microsoft was gone for a month to go visit family, and so nobody was going to notice if I disappeared for a week to go do a short stint in the Modernist Cuisine lab. And that's how that all started. I love it. That's awesome.
Aaron Moncur:So you, you have kind of made a career, or a second career, out of taking industrial technology and moving it into a home kitchen environment. How did you figure out that that was something that you were, you're good at, and that there was, there was an opportunity there?
Scott Heimendinger:Well, it started with sous vide cooking. Once I read about this way of cooking, it just clicked with my engineering brain, like, Oh, this is why haven't we been cooking this way all along? But then I was so frustrated by the fact that the barrier to entry was just cost so much that these machines were so expensive, and a sous vide immersion circulator has one job, and it's to keep water at the right temperature. And I'm a little stubborn, and so I decided it should not cost$1,200 to heat water, and I reverse engineered how those devices work. They're not all that complicated. I rebuilt one from about $75 in parts on Amazon, and then I posted the instructions on how to do it on my site. And I thought maybe 10 people would care, but it turned out that a lot of people cared. They were also they sort of felt this pain, felt this frustration, and followed along. And I had 1000s of people do this build, and they it got published in Make Magazine, which is a big sort of engineering geek stamp of approval, an episode of The Simpsons, actually an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon showed my DIY machine, which was crazy. They didn't even tell me about it. I stumbled. It was it was such a moment. It was so cool. And that led to me co founding my first startup, which was called sansare. We decided the world needs a $200 sous vide immersion circulator, and we started on Kickstarter, and it went very well, and it was a great learning experience. And we sold a bunch of machines and got them in people's homes. And that got me hooked. That gave me the first little taste that I could play a role in helping tear down some of these barriers for home cooks like me,
Aaron Moncur:that's phenomenal. Were you was your sous vide immersion heater? Kind of the first consumer grade sous vide immersion heater. Okay, yeah,
Scott Heimendinger:yeah, there were, there were a couple other sort of, I would say, in our cohort, but we launched with the first sub $200 one for home cooks and and help, help bring that category to life.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome. Yeah, I'm intrigued by this because right around that timeframe, we purchased a sous vide immersion heater, and it was right around that price point, you know, just sub 201 8170, something like that. And it was great, you know, it worked great. I didn't know a lot about sous vide at the time, but we got some experience, obviously. And then after that, it was so interesting. I started seeing these immersion heaters, these, these consumer grade, sub$200 you know, relatively inexpensive submersion heaters at our customers facilities. Now we work with a lot of medical device companies. Now, these weren't like in their production lines. But like in their R and D labs, they'd have these relatively inexpensive immersion heaters. And they work, you know, just perfectly. You want to create a bath of water that's that's body temperature, right, something like that, and just stick this in. Prior to that, they'd spend 1000s of dollars to use a more industrial solution, but these things work. I mean, honestly, I was at a customer's facility just a few months ago, and I saw one there. And so it's so cool. How you know these quote, unquote, consumer grade products are being adopted in industry? You've kind of gone the opposite way. Take something from industry to consumer, but now it's going full circle, and I see these consumer products in industry being utilized in, you know, industrial settings, anyway, very cool. Yeah, it
Scott Heimendinger:flows both directions. And once you see that something is available, you know, you might discover it with your consumer glasses on, and then realize, oh, I can bring it to work. We had people who were developing film with this. We had one day a. Um, it was a very small office, you know, pretty ragtag startup kind of thing, and so we didn't, there was no customer stuff going on at our office, but somebody looked up the address and rolled up in what I can only describe as the mystery wagon, and he he came out holding his sons sous vide machine from us, and it looked like it had been rescued from the wreck of the Titanic. It turned out he was using it for some kind of cannabis THC extraction. It had been running six months straight. Wow.
Aaron Moncur:Oh man, so cool, making these tools so much more approachable or available to the masses. Something I saw on, I think it was YouTube. It was in relation to your, your ultrasonic chef's knife. You did some pretty cool testing on it, which I love, because a lot of what we do here at my company is we build custom equipment for testing. And I recognize the robot that was, I think it was a universal robot that I saw that was doing your testing. I might be mistaken, but I know when I saw it, I thought, Oh, I know that robot. Talk to us a little bit about the testing that you've done for your actually, let's back up just a little bit. I'm getting ahead of myself. So you did the sous vide, right, immersion heater. And then what was what was next? Did? Was it straight to this knife, or was there a stop in the middle?
Scott Heimendinger:No, there were a couple stops in the middle. So I worked at the Modernist Cuisine research lab for about seven years in total. Took a little sabbatical to focus on the sous vide company for a while before I came back. And while I was there, I got to develop some of my engineering skills that hadn't previously existed. The Modernist Cuisine kitchen was located in this building that had all sorts of other science going on. There were Bio Labs and chemistry labs and and scanning electron microscopes, and people doing nuclear physics and whatever. And on the bottom floor of the building was in the most incredible rapid prototyping machine shop that had everything that you could imagine. And I was fortunate enough to have access to it and have people show me the ropes for for, for the machines that couldn't eat themselves if you operate them poorly, you know, the I didn't get to use the giant, you know, five axis milling machines, but I did get to use the laser and the water jet and the and, you know, some of the manual tools and things. And ended up developing those skills to build all sorts of custom camera rigs. We were developing new techniques for photography and video for food, for capturing processes that just happen way too fast to get with a normal camera, or that are too big or too small or too slow, or all of these things. So we did just way off the deep end with photography. One of the rigs I built, we took our phantom high speed camera. The phantoms are very expensive, heavy industrial cameras that can shoot at up to a million frames a second. For this one, and I dropped it in free fall, seven feet. No, I built, I built a rig called drop cam that intentionally dropped it. Intentionally intentionally dropped Okay, good, good, controlled fashion. Yep, I dropped it. I dropped it seven feet in free fall, in this big rig that I built where, at the same time, we released a trapdoor that would drop, for example, a bowl of Froot Loops. And when you put a black background behind it, there's no reference. Free Fall looks like zero G Wow. And even though we only had, you know, about a second as it was falling to the ground, that gave us three minutes of playback of zero G footage, and then we had to figure out, how do you stop the camera? You know? How does the free fall end? Yeah, and I talked to some engineering companies, and they would have this big servo that would slow it down and dump the energy into these giant capacitors. And that would cost about $15,000 but I did a little bit of envelope math and got $20 worth of memory foam, and that did the trick too.
Aaron Moncur:That's great duct tape and super glue engineering. There is a place exactly.
Scott Heimendinger:So that was a lot of playtime and getting to develop some engineering chops, learning, making my first PCBs and learning electrical engineering and learning CAD and learning cam. A little bit there and then I joined Innova after that as their Chief Innovation Officer and helped them develop the first home combi oven for home cooks. Yeah, this is, again, in the same vein of taking a commercial technology and making it available to folks at home. These are normally 6000 12,000 $20,000 ovens that are used in commercial environments and high end restaurants. And I help them develop a $600 version that could allow you to, for all the engineers in the audience, control the wet bulb temperature of your food as it cooked, instead of just the dry bulb temperature. And the short version of that is it means you get all the benefits of sous vide, but without having to create a water bath, without having to vacuum seal your food, and without having to run at high humidity. So you can roast a chicken get sous vide like perfect doneness, but the the skin still stays dry, so you can crisp it up in a Browning stage at the end. That's a big
Aaron Moncur:deal, because I remember in our sous vide experimentation days, one of the problems that we would have, not a lot, but every now and then was the vacuum seal bad bag would leak right and now we have, like, wet, soggy meat inside. It's gross, and you really don't want to do anything with it after that. So I get the value of a dry sous vide, quote, unquote, sous vide environment. Okay, man, you, you have worked in just some really fun roles, like a playground for the engineering brain. It seems like I
Scott Heimendinger:feel extremely fortunate to have stumbled very unintentionally into doing something that I totally love.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. How did you convince the first company not a nova modern cuisine to let you work there like, I guess, I guess you already had some street credit from the sous vide product that you had created, right? So, yeah, I guess it wasn't that big of a leap.
Scott Heimendinger:So when I first joined Modernist Cuisine, I hadn't actually launched SANZAR yet I did that mostly as moonlighting sanction, okay, I convinced Modernist Cuisine to hire me. Because while I was still at Microsoft, before I had discovered that Modernist Cuisine existed, I became friends with somebody who had access to the Microsoft hardware lab, where they do prototyping of various things. And he let me come in after hours and use their laser cutter. And I used it to laser etch pumpkins and to cut out decorative shapes from Nori, from seaweed paper, and to try cutting sheets of hard caramel. And so I misused it for all these culinary purposes, to push the boundaries and do creative things and and I think I was probably I had never seen anybody do this, let me put it that way. And so when I arrived at Modernist Cuisine, they already knew that I was slightly nuts. But then they kind of, they, they let me loose in this, in this one week, kind of hang out, you know, be a friend of the lab called a stage in a culinary setting. It's sort of an internship. And they sat me down at the laser with some pastry sheets, and I kind of went wild and, and I think Nathan realized that I am the same flavor of crazy that he is, and so they created a role for me and, and I'm I appreciate that greatly. Terrific.
Aaron Moncur:All right, I'm going to take a very short break here. Something I want to share with our listeners is that we recently started something called the pipeline Media Lab, and this is the space in which we are releasing all the media that we're doing. So we've had the wave, we've had the podcast. Obviously, we have our in person event, PDX. We have a newsletter now, and all of that is happening now under the pipeline Media Lab brand, and if you want to be notified about free webinars and events that we're doing and challenges that we're doing and different content for engineers, go to pipeline Media Lab, dot engineer, and you can sign up for the newsletter, and that's where we will give you notifications about all the cool stuff that we're doing. So All right, now that we're through that, back to focusing on Scott. So Scott, let's talk a little bit about the robot now and and the testing. And, dang it, I keep getting ahead of myself. I'm so excited about this robot and the testing. Before we get to that, talk us through the knife, the ultrasonic chef knife. Where did the idea from? That come from. How did you get started with it?
Scott Heimendinger:I knew so. I made a I made a conscious decision to leave my gainful employment, which was a dream job again. But you know, when you have that entrepreneurial itch, it's hard to ignore. And I decided that I wanted to. Try to make something again, but I didn't know what, and one night, I was watching my YouTube algorithm, and it served me up footage of commercial ultrasonic food cutting. And I had never seen this before. I think most people have never seen this, and it's wild. Imagine a blade that doesn't look like a knife. It looks like if you took the head of an ax and kind of made it wider, pushing through foods, things like sticky brownies, things like soft breads, things like vegetables, things like cheeses. And it pushes through the food without squishing it. And then when the blade retracts, nothing is stuck to it. It looks like magic, like, if you just saw it now, you'd be like, Oh, that's AI, right? Like, you know, it couldn't possibly be real, but this was before AI was was doing that kind of stuff and and so I said, What? What the heck is this? And I learned what it is, and so I wondered, and then I also learned the size and the price tag of these machines. The power supplies for a small one is like, bigger than a shoe box, and the the the most, the lowest price of these machines that you can find is, you know, about$2,000 but then they go on up in the 10s of 1000s of dollars. So I wondered, could I take this core concept that ultrasonics can be used to cut without relying only on a very, very sharp blade, and with creating this non stick kind of surface. Could I? Could I translate that idea for home cooks, and could I shrink the electronics to fit inside the handle of an ultra of an ordinary knife, while still somehow keeping the same type of blade shape that we know and love, and that's very useful for regular cutting, and I opened my notebook, and I sketched down the idea, and I wrote a little project plan about how I was going to prototype the technology, file, a patent, go out and license it to a company that makes this kind of stuff, and that was going to take me about six months, and I wrote that down six years ago.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, not a huge shock. We, all of us engineers, understand how long it takes to develop a new price, especially one is as daunting as this. I mean packing all that technology in in such a small package, not to mention the power density that you would need for that. So, okay, you decided to do this. Hoped it was going to take six months. It's taken six years. Where, where did you get started? Where, what were some of the challenges that you encountered early on, and how did you overcome those? Those, let's, let's focus for now on some of the technical challenges.
Scott Heimendinger:Absolutely first I will say this was the hardest thing I have ever done by at least an order of magnitude, like it's crazy how much more difficult this was than I imagined. The first challenge was just understanding ultrasonics and resonance as a domain of engineering, it's very peculiar. Things don't behave in a straightforward way. If you talk to a professional Ultra Power ultrasonics engineer and you talk about driving the load, basically the thing that's doing the work to make something move. They call it a neurotic load, because when you're below resonance, it behaves in a resistive manner, and when you're at resonance, it behaves in this way. And when you're beyond resonance, it behaves capacitive. And it's, it's, it's very challenging to model, and modeling it for anything other than devices that are sort of already exist and have well characterized shapes and whatever is a fool's errand. So even though there are equations that describe how all of this work, if you are trying to resonate a shape that's not a cylinder or a tapered cylinder or a rectangle, you can throw all the math out the window. You have to do this the hard way. So that was the first thing. Difficult thing was just, just finding a way in to begin an understanding and build a mental model.
Aaron Moncur:I have a question here. Okay, so you mentioned, if you're not dealing with, let's call it a standard shape. The math doesn't really work, and so physical testing would be the next logical step. Now we're engineers. Everyone listening to this. As an engineer, I know the question is going to come up, what about simulation? Is simulation something that does work to model this type of product?
Scott Heimendinger:Yes, and I did. I ran 1000s of FEA simulations, particularly modal analysis, was what I was looking for. The goal for designing a system like this, for designing an ultrasonic knife, is to create a longitudinal motion, so in other words, along the length of the spine, you want to build up a standing wave in resonance, and that's what does the work. If you are off resonance, talking about an ultrasonic thing, your power goes down by a factor of 10 to 100 so it's basically not doing any work unless, or any useful work, unless you're at resonance. When you think about a system like a cylinder or a tapered cylinder, just like you'd see in an ultrasonic cleaning bath, those those physical transducers are stiff on almost every axis except the one they want to drive, except that longitudinal axis, which means that it's not going to pick up some twisting mode or bending mode, or flag waving mode or something like that. It's just going to do what you want, and you're going to have a really clean frequency response with one peak that's easy to track, and then everything else is basically silence. But a chef's knife is not shaped that way. A chef's knife is long and thin and asymmetric on every axis except one. And so figuring out a design that that would allow me to create this longitudinal standing wave was really, really hard, so 1000s of simulations guided that. But these, the FEA simulations for ultrasonics are also really sensitive to input parameters, so material densities and clamping forces and all of these things, and and also, for example, like modeling the modeling the part of the system that moves, is one thing, but then integrating that with the handle and the other things that are going to dampen some of that energy is another and so now you're blowing out the complexity of the simulation, the computational work that it takes to do these things. So simulation was sort of like licking my finger and putting it up to the wind to understand which way it was blowing. But then I just had to fabricate these things and test them. And so I spent so much time at the workbench stacking up systems. When I say stacking up, when we talk about ultrasonics, generally, you're talking about, for the hardcore engineers in the audience, a bolt clamped Langevin configuration. It's a lot of words to say. You you have a set of piezo crystals in an even number, and you sandwich them, positive to positive, negative to negative. You put a mass behind them that's going to help spread out their clamping load, but also contribute to some of the motion of resonance. It sort of acts like a like a weight helping the spring move. And you bolt that real strong onto the thing that's going to resonate with some electrodes in between. That's how you inject your power signal. And so I still have on on the bench behind me, my vice setup and a really big torque wrench and clamping and unclamping, trying different preload voltages, trying different back mass configurations, trying different blade shapes, doing broad frequency sweeps. And then the next problem you run into is figuring out how to characterize what is good and what is bad, like, like, how do you know if it's working right, right? This is a an extra tricky problem in ultrasonics, because the amount of movement that you get out of a blade, even even a commercial blade running at 2000 watts, you're talking about a stroke length of 10 microns, maybe 20 microns. And you just can't, like you can't see that with the naked eye. It's just too small to visually see. You can optically see it on an optical microscope. That's okay, but then you're looking at a, you know, let's say, 100 by 100 micron piece of the blade at any one time. So okay, it's it's not moving here, but is it moving somewhere else and and so I went through all sorts of iterations of bouncing laser lines off the blade and putting microphone pickups and trying to measure it with magnets and and using optical microscopy, turned out one of the best ways. To actually visualize what's going on is using something called a laser Doppler vibrometer. Are you familiar with that tool? I'm not. No, it's so deeply cool. It's a system of laser scanners and cameras that sweep a beam of laser light across the thing you're measuring. And they have laser interferometers that can measure the movement of the thing that's being reflected by looking at the Doppler shift. So you bounce it off, and if it's moving in that direction, you get a Doppler shift. And then a bunch of very cool software that reconstructs in 3d these very small movement so you can see them and and what it plays back looks just like an FEA simulation. The problem is that to rent a basic version of this machine would have cost me$10,000 a week, and that was way outside my budget. So I did the next best thing. I got popcorn. Salt. I just got popcorn. Salt, fine grain salt, any sugar would work too. And I I sprinkled it across the surface of the blade, and then I turned it on and did frequency sweeps. And as the blade moves and it creates sort of high points or anti nodes where the surface is moving and nodes where the surface is not moving, you see these patterns. You might know them as clodney patterns from, you know, seventh grade science class where you have a speaker on an aluminum plate, and you pour some salt and you see the cool patterns form. That turned out to be one of the best ways to visualize this for about $3 instead of, instead of that expensive
Aaron Moncur:piece, you are really good at taking solutions that could cost a lot of money and taking them down to just just such a simple, inexpensive form factor, and I think you still use that in your marketing don't you putting the popcorn, salt or sugar, or whatever it is, on the knife and then filming that? I've seen that on on some of your marketing materials, the
Scott Heimendinger:pet the patterns themselves are beautiful. I mean, they're really cool looking, but it is also just very neat to have a way to visualize what's otherwise out of reach. You know what I mean?
Aaron Moncur:Right? Okay, I have a couple of nerdy engineering questions that don't really matter, but I'm curious if you were starting with simulations, you had to have a CAD model to run those simulations with. What CAD software did you use to model the knife shapes?
Scott Heimendinger:I did my work in Fusion 360 they have licensing models that are startup and entrepreneur friendly, and then, unfortunately, they moved all their simulation to the cloud, and so now you have to pay credits for that. But compared to some of the other software packages that was easy to learn and get started, and the pricing wasn't as scary as, you know, ANSYS, or, you know, some of the other packages are, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:I was wondering if answers might pop up in there, but Right. Okay. So then the other question, kind of related to that, is, was it just you this most of this time, or did you have a team behind you, like during the entire development? How did that work?
Scott Heimendinger:It was just me for a little more than four years? Okay, the room that I'm in right now is the guest room of our apartment, and my wife let me turn it into my lab. So, you know, we've had a robot arm and a bench grinder and a soldering station and actually welded in this room. That was a terrible idea, but it was, it was me chained to the workbench for a little more than four years, trying to figure all this out on my own. So my, my, most of my engineering skills are self taught. I learned and and I will say this. I think that what makes what makes me good as a startup person, is that I am good at a wide variety of engineering disciplines, but I'm not great at any of them. I am. I am not an expert in any of these, but it was enough that I could figure out, like, what should this look like? How should it work? How can I validate that this approach will work so that when I went to the experts, when I went to an actual professional electrical engineer, when I went to an actual professional mechanical engineer, I wasn't starting from scratch, and I would have at least enough vocabulary to be able to work with them effectively and not feel like an idiot.
Aaron Moncur:I think you're short selling yourself. I mean, just listening to some of the the processes that you came up with and how you developed a product, you went pretty deep in some of these areas. Success. Fully so kudos to you. Congratulations for for everything you did. I love your shop. I love that it's a spare bedroom in your apartment. That's how I started my company. It was a spare bedroom in my house for a long time, and it looks like you could have fooled me. It looks like you're just in a lab in some industrial park somewhere. Well, thank you. Okay, I had another question about when you were doing all this testing. You mentioned, I don't know how many blades you went through, but probably a lot or shapes anyway. How are you making all these Did you also start making your own blades?
Scott Heimendinger:Yeah, great question. So I used every method available to me to fabricate stuff for prototypes when I very like, the very first blades that I made were actually 3d printed stainless steel, because it was the most cost effective way to get that shape, really. And then you can't, you can't 3d print a sharp blade in stainless steel, but you could be print something and then clean it up on a belt grinder. What I didn't appreciate at the time, though, was for the realm of ultrasonics, when you're stacking up piezo crystals next to the thing you want to resonate, you need really flat faces. You need really high quality mating between those parts for things to work. And of course, you don't get that from 3d printed materials. The surface is always sort of rough. So then I graduated to having parts CNC milled for me, not necessarily made out of blade steels, but made out of tool steels and things like that to try to get close enough. And I used online services where I could just upload my CAD files, pick my materials, and then those parts would show up in the mail. And that was great too, because I was milling pieces that would have required a lot of equipment, and at that point, I didn't know cam. I had no idea how to set up a milling job, and so that made it easy and approachable, sort of on a cost basis. I used printing, of course, for everything I could handle, plastics and enclosures and things like that, for my PCBs, some of the first things that I did were on breadboards. But then I very quickly learned about breadboard hell, and is the problem my code, or is the problem a loose connection? And so I started designing PCBs using just online tools and having those fabricated by some of the suppliers, where you can just sort of upload your gerber files, and you get boards in the mail two days later. Then I graduated to having them do some of the assembly. By the time I was using like, you know, components so small that I could easily swallow 100 of them, I got tired of soldering that by hand. And it turns out their pick and place robots have steadier hands than I do, yep, and then eventually graduating all the way to working with my identifying and working with my suppliers, having them make these parts. You know this? This knife is made from parts that are metal, injection molded, CNC milled, stamped from three layer Japanese steel and TIG welded together. I've got complex injection molds with lots of tool action PCBs that are Rigid Flex, so my main handle PCB folds over on itself twice to have six layers so we can use the three dimensional space inside the handle. Yeah, kind of not everything, but close to all the engineering methods you could imagine going into this.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, you learned so much in order to bring this product to life. I'm so impressed. Congratulations again for doing all that. Let's see. I had a question. Well, let's go to the robot. I think finally we can get to the robot. So talk to us about the robot. How did you use that?
Scott Heimendinger:First I learned when I was at Modernist Cuisine and I was building these sort of semi robotic rigs with pneumatic actuators and stuff that if you give your robot a name, it's less likely to get dismantled or used, you know, for parts for another project. So I made sure to name my robot. It's called J robot choppenheimer, and it is a six axis robot arm. It's actually made by U factory. U factory, they're a Chinese company, and they make nice stuff that is a little more affordable on price, but importantly, has really awesome SDKs so that you can write your own code that runs on it very easily, which. Which was a key feature, nice. But here's, there are two reasons I got this robot. First, I've always wanted a robot, and then this was my excuse, just like, plain and simple, I just wanted
Aaron Moncur:a robot. Who doesn't want a robot, yes, right?
Scott Heimendinger:But, but second, you know the adage, if it can't be measured, it can't be improved. Well, when I started researching chef's knives, I came across all of these best chef's knives guides. You know, food and wine or Bon Appetit, or New York Times will publish their best chef's knife guide, and they always go something like this. We bought 20 chef's knives and we chopped a bunch of onions, and here's our favorites. Yeah, and Okay, fair enough, and it matters if you think it's pretty and it matters if you think it's comfortable. But where's the performance numbers? Where's the actual data? Right? You're plunking down 234, $500 on a chef's knife. I kind of feel like we deserve to know how they perform at cutting food. And as an engineer and a former member of the Microsoft Excel team, I found it completely unsatisfactory that there was no data, so I decided I would make some myself. So I bought 21 of the most popular chef's knives, and I attached them to the robot, and I arranged a series of cutting tests where the robot could move in the same sort of cutting style like a human chef would making slice cuts. I put a high precision laboratory scale underneath the food so I could measure the forces. I wrote some software to control these moves and to gather the data, and then I locked myself in my office with like, two SUVs worth of Costco groceries and gathered over 100,000 data points on how these knives actually cut food, and called it the quantified knife project. And for anybody who's interested? This is up on the web. If you go to Seattle, ultrasonics.com and scroll to the bottom, you can see quantified knife project. The data are all free. They're open source. The raw data and my software are up on GitHub for anybody who wants to run their own numbers or take this as a starting point and expand beyond that. And finally, the world had some data on how cutting works and which of the knives did better for which of the cutting tasks.
Aaron Moncur:This just warms my heart. Scott, I love this. This has already become one of my favorite episodes we've ever recorded. I love the fact that you're using data, right, not just I felt nice or it looked nice, but using data, and then you're just giving it all away to everyone out there. So Okay, the question I have is based on all these, the 21 most popular knives that you tested, and then you test your knife, your ultrasonic knife, how did it perform relative to the others?
Scott Heimendinger:It performs great. Now I can't give you the official quantified score, because we're actually still in process of conducting the identical tests that I did for quantified knife project. I have to set it up and cut the same foods in the same way, so it's apples to apples. But what we have done separately, because the knife is we're actually in production right now, but you can imagine there's still development going on behind the scenes. We've been doing tests of the knife's own performance on versus off. So how does it cut with ultrasonics on versus ultrasonics off? And the benchmark that I can share with you is that for cutting tomatoes, we found a greater than 50% reduction in force with the knife on versus off. And that is a significant number, 50% half the force is a huge difference in the human experience of feeling that knife just, you know, if you've ever cut a tomato with a knife that's dull, you have this moment where you're trying to get it to bite into the skin, right? Yeah, and that's the dangerous moment, because you're applying force, you're starting to crank on it, and what happens? It slips off the tomato, and then you're not in control of it. Whereas, when you've got a sharp knife that just glides right into the skin, I It's sort of like new car smell for cooking, you know, it's it's just a it just makes you happy. It makes you want to cook more. It it fills you with confidence. And at the end of the day, that's the reason I'm doing all of this is not because I feel compelled to shove technology into things. It's because I want people at home to feel great about themselves in the kitchen, and technology can sometimes be the way to achieve that.
Aaron Moncur:That's a noble mission. It's. Difficult without the visual supplement. So if you're listening to this for sure, go on to YouTube. Search Scott's name. What's What's the name of the knife? Scott?
Scott Heimendinger:It's the Seattle ultrasonics. C2 100 C dash, 200 chef, 200 C for Chef, 200 for 200 millimeters.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, all right, so go search for that and watch the video. It's really astounding. But Scott, to the best of your ability, without having you know, that visual right in front of us, what is it like cutting with an ultrasonically optimized chef's knife?
Scott Heimendinger:The first thing I'll say is, you know, even though we've got that 50% reduction in force, it's not a lightsaber. I want it to be a lightsaber, and I will spend the rest of my days engineering until it is a lightsaber, but there are still some limitations of physics we have to deal with, like the fact that it operates at a peak power of about 10 watts, which gives you enough time to get dinner made with a reasonable sized battery. You know, there are trade offs that you have to make. I could make a 2000 watt version of this, but you'd get a fraction of a second of cutting time. But the experience is like this. It's, it's sort of like an E bike, right? You know, a bike, a bike with a motor. When you turn on that E bike, it's just easier. The wind is at your back. Going uphill isn't as hard, and that's what it feels like to cut with an ultrasonic knife. It wants to glide into food better. But it's not just that. It behaves as if it's sharper. It also behaves as if it's slicker. So when the ultrasonic action is on, it's actually causing the metal of the blade itself to expand and contract at this microscopic, 10 micron amplitude. So it's not a reciprocating saw where the thing jiggles back and forth. In fact, you can't feel any vibration whatsoever in the handle. It's not like your electric toothbrush that that oscillating motion of the material of the blade means that whatever is in contact with it. This is for the engineers in the audience, that food is experiencing the coefficient of kinetic friction, not the coefficient of static friction, which means that it feels slippery. If you touch it with your fingers, it feels like sliding you a puck over an air hockey table. Okay? And what that gives you is one less friction. Friction is a big part of cutting, but two greater food release. So as you're chopping food wants to just fall off the sides of the blade more rather than building up. That helps you just move faster and get cleaner slices of things like sticky cheese and that kind of stuff.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's a perfect summary. Yeah. Okay, so four years on your own, and then presumably you started developing a team after that, but during this first four years, when it was just you, your wife has graciously allowed you to take over a spare bedroom in the apartment. At any point, did you ever think to yourself, Man, this has been four years like maybe it's not going to work. Maybe, maybe this is just not going to happen, and I should abandon it. And what was your wife, as supportive as she sounds, was there ever a point where she was like, All right, Scott, it's been like, you know, it's been four years now maybe it's time to go look for a quote, unquote, real job out there. How did you handle that aspect of it?
Scott Heimendinger:Yeah, I'm glad you asked. I think it's super important to share this kind of stuff candidly, because it is really hard. I I considered quitting all the time. I'll also also say that, you know, my original plan, as I mentioned, was to develop the technology and then go license it to another company, and about two and change, years into that plan, I went out and I shopped the idea, and I got the best response you could possibly hope for from big companies whose names you would recognize. They loved it, and I did a deal with one of these companies, and it felt like victory. It was going to put a life changing amount of money in my pocket, not not yacht shopping money, but enough money that I could then go start my next invention and have plenty of cushion and all this kind of stuff, and literally in the 11th Hour, like they just didn't sign their half of the DocuSign. And it wasn't because, it wasn't because anything was wrong. We passed all the diligence tests, every every nook and cranny they inspected was all good. It was because this giant multinational company was. About to post bad quarterly earnings. And so everybody got shy, and they just walked away, leaving me with $20,000 of legal bills from negotiating the thing. And so not only like I was starting from below zero at this point, yeah, and this was, this was all. Everything I did here was self funded, and I don't have a giant startup exit or anything like that in my past. This was money I had just saved up from sometimes working multiple jobs at once, and this was my savings account, and it was depleted. And literally, for you know, about two years, my wife was writing me checks so that I could turn around and pay my part of the rent and keep going. And so I had plenty, plenty of times where I said, Should I quit? Is this stupid? Am I on the wrong path? And in those times, it can be really hard to tell from the inside. There are lots of inventors who are in love with their ideas and to the outside world, it seems like no, no, you've you've lost touch with reality. There's a little nuts, you know, maybe the glow in the dark toothbrush is not the moneymaker you think it's going to be. But when you're inside, it's very hard to tell. And so it's so important to have people who you can trust. To be honest with you, my wife, my friends, my family, who told me, keep going, and that's the only reason I did. I would have stopped if they said stop, but they believed in it. They saw the potential. And I feel extraordinarily fortunate to be able to do this, I recognize I have a lot of privilege in even being able to continue having a two Well, in that case, a household income that wasn't my own to allow me to continue.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, wow. What a huge blessing to have a support group like that that kept you going all those years. Good for you. Okay, so we've got a few more minutes and we'll start wrapping things up here. But tell us, where are you right now? I mean, you're in production. You mentioned, what does the team look like right now? And what can we expect like, you know, in the next year or so, when and where? Can Can we see the c2 100 for sale?
Scott Heimendinger:So we did our public launch in September. It's December now, so just couple months ago, and got a fantastic response. I was totally blown away. We actually and so when we launched publicly. This was for pre orders, so reserve your place in line, and we sold through my first production run, which I'm so proud of. We are now selling into the second production run. The first customers will receive their units. They'll be on a boat leaving the factory, either at the end of December, the very beginning of January, and then the second order will will be about a month or two behind that. So the second customer should receive their unit sometime in March. So this is, this is all very, very real. I've been making trips back and forth to where my final excuse me, my final production is in Malaysia, and I've got a great relationship with our factory team there. They're a fantastic bunch of folks, and I can tell you, it is just so deeply cool to walk your own production line and see your idea being actually made in real parts at scale is incredibly cool. So right now, we're focused on getting the word out as production happens and as our first units get on a boat, and then next year, I want to take I want to expand the scope of what we're doing. We started with the chef's knife, because it's the classic shape. It's the one that everybody's going to have in their kitchen. But there are lots of other knife shapes that are great for other purposes, like a nikkiri, which is the sort of rectangle shaped vegetable, sort of cleaver knife, a slicer, or a bread knife, things like that. I want to bring to market next year. You asked about the team. I like to be lean and scrappy, and it's partially because I like to, I like to be hands on still, you know, I just over my shoulder is my desktop CNC machine that I used for prototyping a whole bunch of parts and that I do for laser engraving, some, you know, gift knife sheets that I'm sending out. So I love being hands on. I've got some folks helping with one person who's who's helping with marketing, one person who is running robot tests and helping write some software. I personally wrote all the firmware that runs on the knife, which. It is a lot more than you'd expect, for a thing that has one button. And then the rest of the team is overseas, helping over, helping, literally oversee production and manage shipping schedules and customs and cargo and suppliers. And then the team at the factory who's helping everything out. So we are a small organization. I read all the customer service emails that come in. We are shooting our own, you know, videos with my cameras in another room where it's real startup life here, but we're able to produce at scale, which is an extraordinary thing.
Aaron Moncur:Well, Scott, congratulations again. What a great story this has been. The time has gone way too fast. There are other questions I would love to ask, but let's keep the listeners excited about what's to come and not pull back the curtain too far and reveal everything. Thank you so much for being on the show today. This really was one of the more interesting episodes I've recorded. I think I love the startup environment, right? The scrappiness, doing so many things yourself. It reminds me a lot of when I started pipeline, when I was doing everything myself. I was accounting, I was the engineer, I was the web designer, I was the photographer, all these things. I love that environment, and I love that you're you're finding traction, and it sounds like are about to be very successful with the c2 100 ultrasonic chef's knife. So thank you so much again for being on the show. Is there anything else that you'd like to say before we sign off? Nope.
Scott Heimendinger:If this is piqued your interest, please feel free to visit Seattle ultrasonics.com check it out, see if it's for you or somebody in your life, and if this story has inspired you to maybe take one half step forward in an engineering journey of your own. I really recommend going for it. It's hard, but it's so worth it.
Aaron Moncur:Thank you so much, Scott. I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You
