Independent validation for market credibility

What is Effium?

Effium is a Delft based company that is solving a problem that millions of people daily experience while preparing their meals. With the current pans people use when cooking on gas, almost 70% of heat is wasted along the sides of the pan. As a result it takes more time to prepare. On top, you are not cooking your food that well. At Effium we have designed and developed a pan that solves that using techniques inspired from space engineering.

What started as an everyday annoyance gradually transitioned towards a startup.

How did you come up with the idea?

In India - where I am from - my mother cooked for me. When I moved to Delft to study at the TU/Delft I had to learn to cook. My mother would assist me through facetime and gave me tips and suggestions. The main frustration that drove me was that so much heat was lost from the side of my pan when cooking on gas, and it was taking a lot of time to prepare my meal. I decided to make a passion project to solve the heat loss problem of current pans on gas stoves.

I learned that current pans are designed to fit gas, induction, ceramic and electric cooking. It’s kind of like “one size fits nobody” and current pan manufacturers are not doing anything new. Pans are not optimized for the dominant source of energy – gas stoves. With traditional pans you get a diluted performance for gas. And did you know that in the Netherlands nearly 4 million homes cook on gas?  Worldwide that number reaches 1 billion homes. Can you image the kind of impact we can make? What started as a passion project gradually transitioned towards a startup.

What makes your technological approach unique?

It is kind of cool story. The very root of it was winning a product design competition during the course “Smart Energy Products”. Students had to come up with a product design and my project come out as a winner. Later, as part of my Master in Mechanical Engineering at TU/Delft I was doing an internship at Airbus Netherlands. A fellow intern there mentioned I should check out ESA Open Day. There, at Space Expo Noordwijk, I saw Ariane 5 rocket engine. I was captivated by the thermal design. If rocket engineers could design to handle extreme heat efficiently, I thought we must be able to do so on a pan.

Humans – as a species – have worked with fire to prepare meals for millenia. The pans as we know it is in use for at least a few hundreds of years. Now I feel like we are finally optimizing the pan used in the cooking process. We are increasing the surface area – through heat fins - in a way that captures 2x more heat on existing gas stoves without requiring an infrastrucure change, and enabling powerful searing, faster cooking and saving upto 50% gas.

At what point in your development process did turn to TNO?

Before I went to TNO, I first submitted my pan project to European Space Agency Business Incubation Center (SBIC) in Noordwijk. With a 50.000 EUR grant the startup – named Neo Stove at that time – was really born.

Getting third party independent validation was crucial to strengthen our evidence.

We built a lot of prototypes and gave them to our restaurant chefs, one of our potential customer segments. In the process of learning we made many iterations to the design which we tested with potential users. Post testing in actual service, Michelin star chef Jan van Dobben (from Amarone Rotterdam) instead of feedback, said “I want 5 pans”. The whole process enabled us to validate customer needs leading to a true problem solution fit.

Now, it was time to get TNO involved. As a respected national scientific body, we thought TNO could help us independently test and validate the time and gas savings we claimed. Having third party independent validation was crucial to strengthen our evidence. With the proof we have now we just have a much stronger position in the market.

How did you find TNO Fast Track and how did TNO assist?

We just Googled “how does TNO help startups” and we ran into TNO Fast Track. It was super straight forward. We wanted to do a objective comparison test with a normal pan. Basically we thought it was about clocking the time and gas saved when heating oil and frying beef. This is really where science meets daily life. After the intake we started an exploration to define the requirements.

Once those were defined we set out to answer how do measure it. TNO measured time, temperature, the heat setting and the volume of gas saved during actual cooking/frying of 600g of minced meat. The whole process was perfectly choreographed with a business developer and scientists fully onboard.

Why was independent validation important for your startup?

Effium was in business yes, but that did not mean we instantly had a lot of customers. We wanted to translate from it works at one restaurant to a replication at scale. It gave us a few things. Once we included the results from the TNO in our communication, we could literally tell and show our target audience and prospects. On top, media outlets we were touch with (such as Quote, RTL, NRC, FD and Telegraaf) were more easily convinced knowing that TNO had a scientific role in the process. It is literally the worlds most efficient plan. It became a fundamental part of our communication and it still is.

How do you look back at process with TNO Fast Track?

We knew the question we wanted answers for. Working with independent and specialist experts that defined the steps to get to that point was key. It went wonderfully well. The overall process was well structured and scoped in a way that worked for us. It really felt like a equal partnership.  We both wanted to go the distance. Shared curiosity and shared excitement. Zero bias.