Our Story
My name's Matt, and I'm the co-founder of totchop. With a background in engineering, I often find myself looking for problems to solve. When I was faced with cutting up food for our 8-month-old in 2020, I quickly became aggravated with the tools available. Side of fork? Too hard. Fork and Knife? Too slow. Shears? Too sketchy. Pizza cutter? Too limited.
Then I happened upon a wooden ulu knife set gifted to us as a souvenir. This tool, invented thousands of years ago, became our daily driver since it was hands down the fastest way to cut bites.
Months later, we had a choking scare with our youngest daughter. Our daughter became unresponsive at the dinner table. After calling 911 and performing the Heimlich, we got her to vomit and regain responsiveness. Everything ended up OK, but the experience was a terrifying wake-up call.
In the following days, I started thinking about a product that combined the ingenuity of an ulu, modern conveniences, and the need to check bite size: a dishwasher-safe ulu-inspired knife set with measuring aides. I got with some friends to develop the totchop set over the next year, and left my full-time job to chase my dream of bringing easier meal prep to parents.
Now my family uses totchop every day! It's fast, easy-to-clean, and honestly just fun to use.
We want to be very clear in stating that we did not invent the ulu. More on the ulu's heritage and supporting traditional artisans can be found here.
