In the Kitchen With Raw Rutes

Marta Cornwell is hyperaware that we surround ourselves with stuff—and that most of this stuff isn’t made to last. “In the two years I was in graduate school, I went through two toasters,” she tells me. “This frustration with kitchen tools kind of set me on this journey.” She began asking questions: Can our stuff serve its purpose? Can it be beautiful? Can it last?

As an industrial designer, a food lover, a mother and a citizen, these are the kinds of questions that propel Marta. And which led her and her husband Alex to start their business, Raw Rutes, in April of 2013. Based in Buffalo, Raw Rutes works with local craftspeople and artisans around the world to design, create and sell durable kitchen products with a sense of place. Whether it be their handmade ceramic fermenting crock, a hardwood cabbage shredder, or the whimsical stainless steel “tree brunch” cocktail pick, Raw Rutes products foster a connection with the greater world through food.

It all started with a tofu press, which—at its simplest—can be a weight to press the excess moisture out of bricks of grocery store tofu. “With so many plastic tofu presses on the market, once a little plastic piece breaks, that’s it. You can’t fix it,” Marta says. So, working with a local steel manufacturer, she created her own. The result is the epic four-and-a-half-pound stainless steel Tofu Ninja Press, which in 15 minutes removes 35 percent of the tofu’s total weight in water. The press is also entirely recyclable—not that you would ever want to give the beauty up.

With each product, Raw Rutes aims to create something that is fresh and new or an improvement on what’s already there. When Raw Rutes decided to come out with their own kale stripping tool, they made it stainless steel and sleek—complete with clever holes for stripping herbs—a design that’s gotten attention from The Grommet online marketplace.

Marta describes her approach as “thoughtful design.” She begins with a need, then starts asking what she calls the important questions. “How does this impact the environment? Animals? The local economy?”

In her view, these questions are merely an extension of our current focus on healthy lifestyles. How do the choices we make about our diet, our mental health, our exercise routine—and what we put money into to support our health—impact the world around us, down to the wood in our cabbage shredder?

“I’m asking these questions as a designer so that the consumer doesn’t have to. By the time it gets to them, they can feel good about the product they have,” she says.

Marta started off getting an undergraduate degree in architecture before doing a master’s program in industrial design at RIT. There, she focused on retail design, designing modular fixtures for holding products that could be used by independent shops to help them compete with big-box stores. “I started off wanting to design buildings, and it slowly got whittled down,” Marta laughs, holding the kale razor in her hands. But while her design focus may have gotten smaller and smaller, her worldview has gotten bigger.

A job at Corelle Brands LLC, which still makes its dishware in Corning, NY, gave her the unique experience of being at a company where everything was done under one roof. Design and production were in the same building, allowing her to be close to the process. She saw products coming off the line and could catch problems, such as color, in real time. It was wholly different from the disconnect inherent to most manufacturing today where each function operates in a separate environment. “This holistic model just totally made sense,” Marta says. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we still do it this way?’”

Raw Rutes not only strives to bridge this disconnect, capitalizing on Buffalo’s rich history of manufacturing whenever possible, but to heal the disconnect in American food culture. A native of Poland, Marta grew up fermenting and preserving foods with her grandmother. “Coming from Poland to America, I feel like these traditions—canning and fermenting—skipped a generation here. There was a focus on convenience foods. But now, we’re seeing a big resurgence,” she says of the U.S., where the term “probiotic” has never been more illustrious.

The last decade has not only seen an uptick in consumer consciousness, but also in Americans trying their hand at doing things at home, from growing heirloom tomatoes from seed to fermenting their own cider and kimchi.

Raw Rutes captures this connection to the planet and this can-do attitude, attracting like-minded customers from around the world. Much of their business is done through their online store, where every order is personally sent out by a Raw Rutes employee, while select items have been picked up by online artisan marketplaces The Grommet and Uncommon Goods. You can also find a few of their items at the boutique Peppermint in Rochester.

At this point, Marta “wears all the hats,” representing Raw Rutes at trade shows, taking sales calls, and designing products. Husband, Alex, is the marketing director, while a team of seven others help support. Marta, of course, looks forward to designing new products—a universal masher is hopefully on the horizon—while also finding more ways to integrate Raw Rutes into the community.

It’s been over a decade since Marta’s fated year of two toasters. After sending the second one to the landfill, Marta turned to the internet, certain there had to be something better out there. On eBay, she found an American-made 1950s Sunbeam toaster, and while it didn’t have a “bagel” setting, it didn’t have any plastic pieces to malfunction or fall off, either. “It’s still sitting on my kitchen counter today,” says Marta. And it’ll be on her son’s counter someday, a family heirloom, and proof that when we put thought and quality materials into design, we can create products that last.