Hello World! Meet the Pepper Eater:
Prototype of the Pepper Eater
While visiting a local market in Ziway, Ethiopia, we had the opportunity to meet groups of women who work as red pepper processors. Their story has inspired us to develop a tool that aims to improve the lives of women in rural Ethiopia by both increasing their income potential and decreasing the health effects of processing peppers. Enterprising women in rural Ethiopia who process peppers by hand need more efficient and safer tools because current methods are labor-intensive and hazardous to health. Our product provides three primary benefits. First, it has the potential to increase income generation for these women. Second, our device will make the process safer and more comfortable for our user. Finally, we believe that our product will empower women to become rising entrepreneurs in a male-dominated society.
The Pepper Eater is a hand-powered spice grinder developed as part of Design for Extreme Affordability at Stanford’s d.school. Our team is Megan Kerins, Samuel Hamner, Scott Sadlon, and Siobhan Nolan.
Over the next few months, we will be using this blog to share our journey in implementing production of the Pepper Eater in Ethiopia.
Looking forward to following this project’s progress. Good luck.
Thanks, Tom! How did you hear about us?
Tom is a good friend of mine from high school and university! He’s also a freaking great photographer. Check out his blog!
hi! it looks like it will help women who do this back breaking work daily. is this also intended to replace the manual pounding ? I also looks like it is user appropriate. How about cost!!
Hi Fetlework! Thanks for checking out our blog. Many women we see in markets of smaller, more rural towns, like Ziway and Awassa, currently break dried red peppers into small flakes and separate seeds with their hands. I have seen a few women who use a mortar and pestle to break up the peppers, but not as often. So, the part of the process we are trying to improve is breaking the dried peppers into small flakes and separating the seeds. We are not trying to make pepper powder.
As for cost, our goal is to make it affordable to women who are selling processed pepper in rural markets. We’ve learned that these women make about US$1-3 per day. So are goal is to make it cheaper that one week’s income, which is about US$7-20.
Thanks for the questions! Let us know if you have any more 🙂