How Ergo Chef Began!

The President/Chef Scott Staibs’ Story

I fell in love with the kitchen early on. "We always had big Sunday dinners and we were big on going out to dinner with family. "I fell in love with the atmosphere in a restaurant setting; it got inside me, so when I was 12, I knew I wanted to be a chef."

While taking food service classes in Danbury High School, I 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 in Culinary Arts from Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., I continued working at Ridgewood as the Sauté & grill chef before joining Aramark Food Service Corp., which serviced Union Carbide Corp. and where I was Sous Chef, second in command under the executive chef.

I started developing tendonitis and carpal tunnel symptoms from the repetitiveness of using the chef's knife. I had worked with a lot of chefs with hand and wrist problems, a common ailment with cooks. I began thinking about how to design something that feels more natural when you use it, something comfortable and more efficient, a true extension of your hand. In 1998 I quit my position at Aramark.

I went to my father, Leonard who owns Capitol Design and Engineering, Inc. a design & manufacturing company. It is here I worked on the designs with other chefs & engineers while working at Capitol to increase my knowledge of manufacturing, my knowledge of metals and fabricating things from metal.

I have a pretty extensive collection of chefs' knives, so I started designing the chef knife first because that's used the most in the kitchen. I would hold a knife and just look at it with the engineers and take time to see how it fit in the hand, and how my wrist and hand moved when you used it. I was convinced along with the engineers we could design something that would be more ergonomic.

After about a year of designing and trial of a crude mock up prototype, I had a pretty good model of the professional chef knife that I used for just 3 weeks and all my symptoms were gone. We then made up 50 prototypes, and sent them all over the United States to professional chefs to test for a few weeks each. We knew chefs with carpal tunnel and tendonitis symptoms and let them use the knives first along with many student chefs and professors in different culinary schools. When the knives were returned we packed them up & shipped them to other chefs for testing. We did that for an initial two years, and the response was overwhelming. So overwhelming, in fact, "I patented the design and began working on a full line of cutlery which had been requested by all the chefs and people who used the knives initially. I continued to test the knives as we searched for a manufacturer. The first 3 years drove us crazy as we had been patiently working with a manufacturer who couldn’t produce the quality cutlery we needed, all the while telling us they could. This almost ended my desire to develop a product that we knew really worked. We cut ties with the first manufacturer and began our search again. This led us from U.S. knife makers which were much too costly, to Germany who was also too costly, and finally to the right manufacturer, all the while testing the initial prototypes, we came to the final destination in Asia…A Taiwanese manufacturer who had all the right equipment which was set up by German Engineers. They produced our high quality fully forged line of cutlery in just one year, to our exact specifications with high Carbon German Stainless Steel from Germany. In about June of 2003 we were ready to become a viable business and the name Ergo Chef, LLC was born.