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.
