B. Sprout 2000
B. Sprout 2000, later known as the Veggie Gripper, is a cutting board inspired by my personal inability to slice brussels sprouts. B. Sprout 2000 is a small 6” x 6” bamboo board with CNC stepped divets in the center that hug your fruit/veggie, and knife lines for your knife to follow as you slice.
B. Sprout 2000 was created as a project for Peter Ragonetti's prototyping class at Pratt Institute. I went on to put B. Sprout on Kickstarter, and was funded over 200% and chosen as a "Project We Love". B. Sprout later was licensed for production by Cookduo, and is currently sold as the Veggie Gripper.
Photography: Cookduo
The Problem
A
B
C
Cutting round vegetables can be hard; either (A) your fingers are too close to the knife and can result in injury (i.e., what happens when I cut round veggies), or (B), you move your fingers farther from the line of slice and the veggie rolls away.
Or take scenario (C); a user only has one hand, and unlike myself who just has bad knife skills, the user really needs stabilization of the round vegetable to be able to slice it.
Prototyping
I needed a way for the round vegetable to be held in place, and a way for the knife to able to slice it while it stayed in place. I started prototyping very simple solutions that consisted of stepped holes, that could accommodate various sizes of vegetables, and channels for the knife to safely slice. Accessibility was at the forefront of this product, so I aimed to keep the solution low tech. I 3D printed a bunch of different iterations, and got to testing.
Testing
I experimented with different board sizes, divet sizes, step dimensions, and knife channel placements. I found the knife channel needed to be in a very sweet spot; not too thin, and not too large that the knife could "flop around". I experimented with designs that could potentially slice multiples at once; this proved to not be as efficient as I had hoped, and ultimately a very simple solution was landed on, which was one singular stepped hole in the center of the board, with 2 knife channels going vertically and horizontally.
Kickstarter
I created the final prototype out of an IKEA cutting board using a mill. I used this board to create assets in a Kickstarter campaign that went on to be fully funded, which you can view here (if you dare - I was less of a graphic designer at that point in my life.)
*A very cringe video I filmed and edited for the Kickstarter campaign*
Over 250 units were cut at a CNC shop in Ridgewood, Queens, and then lugged back to my apartment in Brooklyn to be hand sanded by myself on my roof. I packed them up, and sent them out to 198 happy Kickstarter backers in the United States and abroad.
CookDuo
In 2018, B. Sprout 2000 was picked up and licensed by home goods brand Cookduo, where it is still currently sold. You can see it here.
While B. Sprout didn't win any industrial design awards for the most epic class A surfacing known to man, or a marvel of G3 curvature, B. Sprout solved problems for people who didn't have a ton of options and allowed them to enjoy brussels sprouts in the same way that I do.
Thanks to Peter Ragonneti, Quan Li, Grant Ederer, Jordan Ringdahl, and all of my Kickstarter backers.