Testing: how a new product earns its place in the range

A short catalogue is often read as a limited one. Ours is short deliberately: a product is in the range only if it does a job that nothing else in the range does as well.

The bar

Before a product joins the range it has to clear four questions.

1. Is there a real job it does better?

Not a variation for its own sake. A genuine task, done by real kitchens, that our existing products do not serve properly.

The parantha tawa cleared this easily: a paratha station is not a roti station, and a 6 mm flat tawa is not the right tool for it. The jalebi kadai cleared it too — jalebi needs surface area and shallow depth, the opposite of the deep frying profile.

2. Does it survive a real kitchen?

Bench testing tells you very little. What tells you something is putting a vessel into a working kitchen and leaving it there for months, being used by people who have no interest in being gentle with it.

We look at how it comes back: where the finish has worn, whether the base has moved, whether handles have loosened, whether anything has cracked.

3. Can we make it consistently?

A vessel that can be made well once is not a product. Deep drawing in particular has to be repeatable across a whole size range, and a design that only works at one size is not finished.

4. Does it earn the tooling?

Tooling is committed before any sellable vessel exists, and it is a substantial cost. A product has to justify that against the volume it will actually sell.

This is the question that stops most ideas, and it is the correct one to be strict about.

What testing looks like

• Side-by-side comparison. The variant against our current version, in the same kitchen, on the same menu, for the same period. Anything else is guesswork.
• Deliberate abuse. Thermal shock, dry heating, overloading. We want to know where it fails, not to prove that it does not.
• Cleaning cycles. A vessel is scrubbed as often as it is cooked in. Finishes that do not survive a pot wash are not finishes.
• Handling. Can one person lift it full? Does it pour without slopping? Does the lid seat when there is a dent in the rim?

What we have declined to make

Plenty. Vessels that would have sold on novelty but did not do a job better. Sizes that duplicated the two either side. Coated products, which we will not make — a coating is a consumable, and our whole argument is about longevity.

Saying no is most of what keeps a range coherent.

What that means for you

Thirteen lines, each of which is there for a reason, all fully specified with published size charts. If you need something outside them, most of the range is made to order anyway — tell us the job and we will tell you honestly whether we can do it better than what you have.