Dave Krippendorf and Ryan Tseng appeared on Shark Tank pitching Kitchen Safe, a plastic storage container with a time-lock lid that prevents users from accessing junk food. Lori Greiner and guest Shark Nick Woodman of GoPro gave them $100,000. Nick gave them something more—advice to change the name. The Safe should not be limited to food items. Dave and Ryan (and their partner Nick Tseng) took that advice, and today more than half of their customers use the kSafe for alcohol, cigarettes, credit cards, medication, smartphones, TV remotes, tablets and Xbox controllers.
Dave originally came up with the idea—he needed some way to control his cravings for sweets. Dave asked his friend Ryan to help, and Ryan called on his brother Nick, an electrical engineer at Texas Instruments. Surely, the three Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates could come up with world-class design! And so they did, and they founded Warehouse Innovations, Inc. to develop and distribute innovative products to promote healthy living.
Their first product, the kSafe, is a lockable canister-like container with a built-in timer. Put the tempting food or item into the container, put the lid on, and spin the dial on top of the lid to set it from 1 minute to 10 days. Press the button to activate the lock. You have five seconds to change your mind. After that, the container cannot be opened until the time you set runs out. Initially, they included an override, but, human nature being what it is, that defeated the purpose. Anyone really desperate to get to that chocolate chip cookie will need to smash the container. Not that easy to do and, price-wise, hardly worth a cookie.
About the kSafe
It comes in three sizes:
- Mini: 5.5 inches x 5.5 inches x 2 inches for smartphones, cigarettes, credit cards, keys.
- Medium: 5.5 inches x 5.5 inches x 5.5 inches for cookies, donuts, candy, larger smart phones.
- XL: 5.5 inches x 5.5 inches x 10.4 inches for bags of chips, video games and controllers, tablets
Have something larger than that you need to get out of reach? Lock it in a large safe or banker bag and lock the key in the kSafe.
- It comes in white and transparent BPA-free food-grade plastic. The lids come in red, blue and green and fit all sizes.
- It operates on two AA batteries that can be accessed even when locked. The countdown is momentarily interrupted as you change the batteries, then resumes.
Note: In case you are already plotting that you can open the kSafe by removing the batteries, you can’t. Even when the batteries die, the container stays locked.
Update: Kitchen Safe is now called KSafe.
