Fairfield County Business Journal

Knife designer going for global audience
By BOB CHUVALA

Scott Staib, president of Ergo Chef, displays his product in the Danbury office. Staib developed the ergonomically designed knife after being afflicted with carpal tunnel syndrome.

Scott Staib wanted to be a chef ever since he was 12 years old, a desire he attributes "to the Italian side of my family." But his career as a chef, once it got under way, was cut short after he began suffering symptoms of tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome -- complaints, he discovered, afflicting many professional chefs.

While most chefs work through the pain or undergo operations to continue working, Staib took a different path. He began thinking about creating ergonomically designed chefs' knives to reduce or eliminate injuries caused by the repetitive motions of cutting and chopping and slicing on the food line.

The result is his fledgling Ergo Chef knives company in Danbury (www.ergochef.com), which makes seven professional-grade, forged knives he's beginning to market nationally. He hopes sales will be about half a million dollars this year and grow to between $3 million and $5 million within five years. By then, Ergo Chef will have more than tripled its product line by adding a less expensive line of cutlery, a line of professional knives with overmolded handles instead of the classic three-rivet handle, and an array of other kitchen products such as bamboo cutting boards.

Next month, Staib will introduce his stainless steel cutlery to an international audience at the International Home & Housewares Show at McCormick Place in Chicago. "I'm looking to be in front of thousands of potential buyers to introduce them to Ergo Chef and let them see firsthand the quality of our products." The annual event is mainly for retailers looking for new or improved products, with buyers from everything from small gourmet stores to national chains such as Bed, Bath& Beyond and Macy's, he said.

"I'm not nervous," he said. "We've done a lot of smaller shows and demonstrations. That's mainly how we plan to meet our sales projections for this year."

Overwhelming response

Staib said he fell in love with the kitchen early on. "We always had big Sunday dinners and we were big on going out to dinner', he said. "I fell in love with the atmosphere in a restaurant setting; it got inside me, so that when I was 12, I knew I wanted to be a chef."
While taking food service classes in Danbury High School, he worked in the kitchen of the Ridgewood Country Club in Danbury, first as a cold-food chef, later as a line chef.

After receiving an associate degree from Johnson & Wales in Providence, R.I. -- "I wanted to get a little further away from home than CIA," the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., where he would have commuted back and forth to classes -- he continued working at Ridgewood before joining Aramark Food Service Corp., which serviced the Union Carbide Corp. and where he was sous chef, second in command of the kitchen under the executive chef.

"I started developing tendonitis and carpal tunnel symptoms from the repetitiveness of using the chef's knife," Staib said. "I had worked with a lot of chefs with carpal tunnel, and continue to meet them." He began thinking about how to design "something (that) feels more natural when you use it, something comfortable, a true extension of your hand," and in 1998 quit his position at Aramark.

Staib and his father, Leonard -- who owns Capitol Design and Engineering in Commerce Park on the city's east side -- worked on the design while Staib worked at Capitol "to increase my knowledge of manufacturing, my knowledge of metals and fabricating things from metal."

Staib said, "I have a pretty extensive collection of chefs' knives, so I started designing the chef knife first because that's used the most." He would hold a knife and "just look at it and take time to see how it fit in the hand, what it did to the hand when you used it." He was convinced he "could design something that would be more ergonomic."

After about a year of designing, Staib had a professional chef's knife he was pleased with, and had 50 prototypes made in Minnesota. "We sent them all over the United States" to professional chefs to test for a few weeks. "We didn't do a million-dollar study. We knew chefs with carpal symptoms and let them use the knives." When the knives were returned, they were sharpened and sent to other chefs. "We did that for two years, and the response was overwhelming," he said. So overwhelming, in fact, "I patented the design."

World-class knives

Ergo Chef knives are forged -- not stamped - in a 40-year-old plant in Taiwan set up by Germans using German machinery, Staib said. "There are a lot of different ways to produce knives," he said, but "professionals know the difference." Stamping out the blades is easier but produces an inferior product. "Forging uses tools and heat that shape the knife and make it stronger."

Staib compares his knives to Wusthof and Henckel, both German makers of precision-forged knives for professional and home use with a worldwide reputation. The Germans' seven-piece set sells for about $325; Staib's Ergo Chef for $270 or so.

"I was always a Wusthof fan and used their knives when I worked at Aramark because I thought they were top of the line as far as professional-grade knives are concerned," he said. "I always thought that if you have good tools, you can work better and enjoy it more."
Ergo Chef began selling the complete seven-knife line in 2004, quadrupled sales last year "and we're looking to double our sales this year" to about half a million dollars. "That's our goal," he said.