The Birth of the Cuisinart
Last night I was looking through a cookbook* and read this concise and interesting story of the birth of the Cuisinart food processor from the introduction to the book.
When the Cuisinart Food Processor was unveiled at the Chicago housewares show in January, 1973, it scarcely could have been called a hit. indeed, myopic department-store and kitchen-shop buyers failed to see the machine as anything more than a souped-up blender with an exorbitant price tag. In other words, a white elephant.
Some white elephant. In just six years, it has [she was writing in 1979] spawned a score of imitations and turned America into a food-processor society. No one knows (or to be more accurate, no one will say) how many millions of food processors have been sold across the country since Cuisinart's inauspicious debut, but what is known is that, in 1977, 500,000 of them were bought for Mother's Day in the New York City are alone.
All because Carl G. Sontheimer, a retired electronics engineer and dedicated amateur chef from Connecticut, haunted the French housewares show in Paris in 1971, looking for a project to occupy his spare time. That project turned out to be a powerful, compact French machine called Le Magi-Mix that could grind, chop, mince, slice, puree, pulverize, mix and blend with stunning speed. Sontheimer and his wife Shirley were fascinated. They tracked down the machine's inventor, Pierre Verdun, who had also invented its precursor, Le Robot-Coupe, a heavy-duty restaurant machine dubbed "the buffalo chopper" by American chefs.
Sontheimer secured distribution rights for Le Magi-Mix in the United States, then shipped one dozen back to Connecticut to tinker around with in his garage. He took them apart, reassembled them, kitchen-tested them, his wife kitchen-test them, and he tinkered some more. He refined the French processor's design, improved its slicing and shredding discs, incorporated safety features and rechristened it the Cuisinart.
[Jean Anderson, Jean Anderson's Processor Cooking, New York : William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1979, p. 15.]