MAKE IT WORK
ON-THE-GO, WHOLE-FOOD FEEDER FOR BABIES
SIMPLE DESIGN Sometimes the best design is the simplest design, and the Yummy Spoon riffs on the basic idea of a squeezable toothpaste tube but uses high-tech, flexible, BPA-free liquid silicone that’s FDA-approved.
YUMMY SPOON
H
OW DO YOU REINVENT SOMETHING as simple and basic
as the spoon? All it takes is a specialized need that’s not being met by traditional eating tools. In the case of Yummy Spoon, that need came from moms wanting to easily feed their infants healthy, whole, mashable foods such as bananas, avocados and sweet potatoes while on the go. Gina Cormier had the idea and a crude, functional vision for such a tool—a toothpaste-like tube with a spoon on the end of it that squished foods and squeezed them out so a baby could easily eat them. She and her brother Paul Martello decided to see if they could make a more refined and practical version that would appeal to busy moms. They turned to industrial designer Ben Denzinger, ID 08, to find a solution. “Soon after Paul reached out to me with this idea, I started sketching up as many different designs as I could,” Denzinger says. The device needed to be wide enough to accommodate a variety of foods, but at the same time portable. Additionally, it needed a good seal to keep the food locked in so that it wouldn’t make a mess, especially when thrown in a purse. It also needed to be fairly flexible and made from BPA-free materials. Denzinger came up with an asymmetrical design that seemed like it would function well and looked appealing. “That toothpaste-tube spirit is still there,” he says. He printed out 1:1 drawings of it to make sure the scale was right, then 64 | GTALUMNIMAG.COM | Volume 92 No. 3 2016
MOTHER OF INVENTION
moved to a 3D-printed hard-plastic prototype for proof of concept. The team then sampled out 20 different versions to test a variety of materials and hardnesses for the product’s different components—the squeeze tube, spoon, cap, safety seal and clip—while making sure it would be economical to manufacture and sell. “We tested it with moms, and they gave us a lot of great feedback,” Denzinger says. “They helped us make sure it was made from an FDA-approved material (silicone), easy to clean and water-tight. And they also even suggested foods that could be used with it, including oatmeal.” At the end of the months-long design and testing process, the Yummy Spoon was ready for molding and production. It’s been available since this spring and retails online for $12.90 at www.yummyspoon.com, Groupon and Amazon. The next step is getting into brick-and-mortar stores. “We’ve gotten a lot of interest and
Prototype testing showed that moms wanted a secure front-end cap and a watertight back-end clasp so they could load the spoon with food and keep it in their bags without making a mess.
have signed up with brokers for massmarket retailers,” Martello says. It doesn’t hurt that Yummy Spoon won the 2016 Best New Product award by ECRM/Drug Store News. “We were one of the newest, smallest companies at ECRM’s Baby & Infant Show,” he says. “We were competing against several industry giants and won.”