23: Inventing a Safer Kitchen Tool - Lori Turk

Have you or someone you know cut themselves in the kitchen recently grating or slicing food?

In this episode, Lori Turk, Owner of April Ideas & Inventor of the SAFEGRATE™ kitchen gadget, shares with us her journey to developing and launching her product. SAFEGRATE™ is a kitchen tool that protects your fingers when grating food so that food preparation is SAFE for the whole family.

In this episode, you’ll learn about:

The steps Lori took to bring her product to the market
The patent process and what options you have
How testing your prototype in every way is vital to do before launching
Ways she has gained distribution including launching on Amazon and hiring a distributor
The key behaviour you must have as an entrepreneur

About Lori Turk:

Lori is the inventor of the SAFEGRATE™ kitchen gadget and founder of the April Ideas company she created to support this consumer product. Laid off after 26+ years as a Specialist Sales/Rare Disease Medicine Representative in the Pharmaceutical Industry, it was the chance event in her kitchen of cutting her thumbnail painfully while grating a potato that inspired her to invent a solution to the problem she seemed to experience often in her kitchen.

She was sure she wasn’t the only kitchen klutz and her research confirmed this.

Like most entrepreneurs, she does virtually everything in the company as a start-up and after her product was on the market for only 3 months, she was nominated for a “Start Up of the Year” award with the Mompreneurs (now RevolutionHer™) Canada-wide organization.

Lori has parlayed that sales background with optimistic persistence resulting in having a sales agency take on her SAFEGRATE in Canada within 6 months of launch. Her hope is that most households in the world who have a grater will think of pulling a SAFEGRATE™ out of their drawer to use with it so they won’t cut themselves like she did.