© 2024
Virginia's Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Some Dedicated Staunton Dads Dub The No-Mess SLRP Bowl

If you’ve been to the crowd-funding website called Kickstarter, you know there are some pretty crazy ideas out there, but five dads from Staunton are betting their latest brainstorm will make a lot of kids and moms happy. 

There’s just a little of that delicious broth left in the bottom of your soup bowl, a lone noodle, some sweet milk from your morning cereal or a little melted ice cream.  No one is looking, so what do you do?

That’s right.  Slurp it up.  We adults are pretty good at that, but it’s definitely a learned behavior.  When Sean Harvey arrived for a monthly meeting of his dad’s support group, he was pretty upset.  He’d been cooking breakfast for the family – running late for school – when 4-year-old Henry decided to down the rest of his cereal in a single swallow.

“I looked over, and he had the whole bowl of cereal tipped up to his mouth, and milk was running down both sides of his face and all over his shirt and all over the floor, and of course this is five minutes before we need to leave, so there’s this big panic to get him cleaned up and get the clothes changed and get out the door and still make it to school on time, and he said, ‘I don’t know why more bowls aren’t drinkable.’”

That’s Sean’s friend Peter Denbigh who says he could relate.  In fact, the guys got pretty excited about the idea of a bowl designed for slurpers. 

  “We just got out the white board and the markers and just started doodling.  If we could design a bowl, what would it look like? And honestly, it was almost a joke at the time, but after about 15 minutes of brainstorming we had an idea that kind of excited us.”

What they proposed was a bowl shaped like an egg, curving naturally at one end, to make drinking easy.  Harvey tested a prototype on Henry.

“All of our little boys have at some point over the last three months have been eating cereal out of SLRP bowls.   

“So far so good in terms of the mess?” 

“There is no mess.  There’s just excitement.”

Made from a BPA-free plastic – in teal, dark blue or salmon pink -- the SLRP bowl has a rubber-like base to hold it in place, and a silicon rim to keep spoons from slipping away.

“If you have small spoons, well they tend to slip in, so Peter came up with this thing called Spoon Capture, and it’s actually part of the design, where it catches the spoon. It’s pretty clever.”

The guys crunched some numbers and concluded they would need to make at least 7,000 bowls in order to charge $8 apiece.  That meant raising $70,000 for a first run, so they turned to Kickstarter – a proving ground for new ideas.

“People will say it’s a great idea.  It’s a great idea, but you don’t know if it’s a great idea until they’re willing to pull out their pocketbooks and exchange hard earned money for something that makes their lives better.”

After just seven hours, they had raised a thousand dollars – selling each prospective customer two bowls with sealable lids and shipping for $21.  It was a heady experience for Denbigh.

“At the click of a button, we went from a local idea distributed among five guys to something that has potentially a global reach.”

And the guys suspect their new-fangled bowls could go beyond kids.  Here again is Sean Harvey.

“For a young, single guy?  Yeah, absolutely.”

The product and the company will be known as SLRP, and by June 5th  when the Kickstarter campaign ends,  the guys will know whether the rest of the world agrees.  We’ve been eating from round bowls for millennia, but it could be time for a change.  

You can find more information on the SLRP Bowl here.

Related Content