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Claus Gerlach leans his tall frame against a post and scoops caramel pudding from a plastic cup. The handle may be splintered, but the spoon still works.
"Nothing goes to waste," he says between mouthfuls.
Gerlach and Terry Bigsby, co-founders of B.C.-based Aspenware Inc,. rely on research and development to grow their business, and every mistake — even the fractured handle of a spoon — improves their manufacturing process and their final product.
Aspenware makes disposable utensils from wood. It's cutlery that composts naturally and could lessen the estimated 50 billion pieces of plastic that reach North American landfills each year. Their product, named WÜN, appeals to environmentalists and can replace plastic flatware at any cafeteria, fast food outlet, airplane or picnic. Bigsby says one of their forks will even biodegrade on a glacier, making WÜN suitable for the backcountry too.
To get here, Gerlach and Bigsby, two former high school shop teachers from Vernon, B.C., invested heavily in trial and error. Ten years ago they were gluing together pieces of wood veneer and brainstorming around the kitchen table with Bigsby's father and fourth entrepreneur. They took hours to construct their first fork and in the meantime recycled dozens of prototypes.
Each set back taught them something new.
Gerlach and Bigsby resigned their teaching positions and in September 2005, with $900,000 in investments from friends, family and fellow teachers, moved out of the garage they were using and into a 15,000-square-foot, North Okanagan factory that was previously a wholesale bakery. They bought their first equipment, two second-hand lathes once used to make chopsticks, and have made innumerable modifications to both machines as well as the assembly line that feeds them. The lathes carve birch veneer (like unrolling a short, round log as you would a roll of toilet paper), creating a flat wood sheet which is then tested for moisture, dried, glued, punched into flatware, sprayed with edible coating, branded and finally packaged.
"Are we engineers? No," Bigsby states. "Are we mechanics? Not really. People come by the facility and ask us who's doing our design," he raises his hand in the form of a response. "Your fabrication?" He lifts his hand again. "People ask us if we're in the business of making machines or cutlery. The answer is yes."
Gerlach and Bigsby, whose friendship dates back 30 years to high school, have spent a decade building their product and two months trying to sell it. Their patience has paid off and so far adds up to shelf space in Whole Foods and Vancouver's urban garden market Capers, a contract with catering giant Sysco, and preliminary talks to provide cutlery for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Add to that a string of design awards and the attention of Premier Gordon Campbell who showed off the utensils at an economic summit in 2005, and Gerlach and Bigsby are confident they're marketing a product that's hard to criticise.
Intended to be thrown away and designed to biodegrade, WÜN cutlery is basically ecological, gentrified firewood that resists flexing, flouts splinters and, as Bigsby has demonstrated to investors, cleanly slices both steak and ripe tomatoes. Birch is also incidental to the harvest of softwood and is commonly left in the bush to burn or rot. They count 19 employees and are deciding where to build future manufacturing plants with their sights set on northern B.C. and perhaps also eastern Canada.
Since their first U.S. sale to a Jewish wedding party in the fall of 2005 (this is how they learned Wün is also kosher), Aspenware's merchandise has changed "substantially," and as production evolves, so does the product, says Bigsby. Although WÜN was not initially designed to meet Jewish dietary law, the kosher market was a surprising source of revenue for Aspenware. The New York City wedding planners found WÜN on the Internet and ordered 600 pieces of cutlery for a 200-guest reception, says Bigsby, for the novelty of unique plate settings. Although a considerable clientele to pursue in the near future, the kosher-minded order was more by fluke than design and Aspenware has so far been targeting a high-end environmental market.
For example, they could have put a plastic bag of flatware on the market a year ago, but low-quality, non-recyclable merchandise was not part of their business plan. The entrepreneurs maintained their high-end focus and invested heavily in developing the "Cadillac of the cutlery industry," as Bigsby says. To make their mark in a worldwide industry that grows 7 per cent annually, Gerlach and Bigsby accessed technical resources through B.C.'s Solutions for Wood, a program that brings manufacturing advice to businesses, and consulted with fibre specialists at Forintek, a wood products research institute with ties to the University of British Columbia that works one-on-one with about 250 Canadian businesses each year.
Roland Baumeister, Forintek's manager of secondary manufacturing, and two specialists repeatedly visited Aspenware's factory (including an early visit to the garage in 2005) to test numerous adhesives and coatings. Before a confectioner's glaze coated the utensils, for instance, they tried using beeswax. While the natural varnish smelled and tasted wonderful, Bigsby recalls it just didn't cure hard enough. "It wasn't a soggy fork," he says. "It was just sticky."
Gerlach, who describes himself as the realistic anchor to Bigsby's relentlessly optimistic "kite in a windstorm," says the production line has yet to reach full capacity or highest quality. Two years ago the entrepreneurs needed half a day to make one piece of cutlery. Now, from one cubic meter of timbre (roughly the diameter and height of a telephone pole), they can produce about 20,000 single pieces of biodegradable flatware.
While continually developing their product line, Gerlach and Bigsby are also toying with other timber, including maple and eucalyptus. The proof, they say, is in the pudding, and in the case of Aspenware, practice is making perfect.
