Dan Formosa, cooking gadget video star and product designer
The story behind these much-loved videos
As the on-camera personality in the Epicurious Well Equipped videos, Dan Formosa tries out kitchen gadgets so you don’t have to. He will save you from buying devices that disappoint and will amuse you along the way. He’s tested everything from a turkey-carving chainsaw to a grape peeler. In addition to testing products and rating them, he offers up quick, hand-drawn suggestions for improving their usability.
He has starred in 36 episodes, with each one focusing on a set of gadgets in a category. Categories have included gadgets “as seen on tv,” as well as those for slicing, mixing, chopping, opening, nut cracking, and decorating, as well as those for making sandwiches, pasta, brunch, cakes, eggs, and so many more. The series has drawn more than 40 million views. Many hundreds of people comment on the videos and love Dan for his sense of humor and his honest appraisal of kitchen gadgets. He tries in earnest to get each gadget to work and that’s part of the appeal.
When he’s not in front of the cameras at Epicurious, he’s contributing to the design of medical products, teaching design and branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, writing about guitars and baseball, and caring for his three young children.
Your videos get hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of viewer comments. Why do you think the videos are so popular?
I’ve noticed throughout my design career that people think products drop out of the sky [laughs] and that there are no people behind them. There are some products that you warm up to and realize someone thought about the features, or you associate them with people. So that’s part of the reason. Interest in the videos is also coming from the frustration people have about the things they buy, not just kitchen gadgets. [I think they are popular because they are highly entertaining and well produced, we like watching people perform kitchen tasks, and we enjoy seeing flaws revealed.]
What’s the concept of the Well Equipped videos?
The premise of the videos is that the Epicurious team finds bizarre gadgets and puts them in front of me to try. We tend pick odd gadgets that would be interesting for the videos and that are questionable as to whether they will work.
Do you ever get the backstory about the products you are testing?
No, the producer just puts them in front of me. Sometimes there are videos online about how a product is supposed to be used and I will watch those beforehand; there may be a technique to using some products and I want to give them a fair shot.
What’s involved in making the videos?
We shoot them at the Conde Nast studios at the World Trade Center in New York. It takes a full day to shoot one video and it gets edited down to 20 minutes. We shoot two episodes on consecutive days. There’s a whole crew: a couple of camera people, the producer, a director, two people on culinary (they create the set, prepare the food, and will often test the gadgets before the shoot to see what food could work the best—or at least be the most interesting), and an audio person. There is also the “hanging of the drawings” along the back wall of the set, based on the theme.
In addition to trying out products and rating them, I also do a quick sketch of a redesign. That’s not how it works in the real world [of product design and testing]. I don’t always say, “Here’s the answer.” Usually I say, “Here’s what I would try next or change and experiment with.”
The room where we shoot is a bit of a party room. We have fun. Everyone is making comments and laughing. Some of the things that don’t get on camera are probably funnier than what gets on camera. Anyone on the crew can make suggestions and they will come up with horrible puns that I will sometimes say on camera [viewers love these as evidenced by their comments]. We shoot two episodes every two months and editing takes a couple weeks.
What led you to include the oiled left-hand test?
It’s a trick that I give to a design or engineering team when I’m advising on a product, and it helps them see issues with the design. It’s a quick way to assess usability, but you ultimately want to have many people testing a product if it’s a true usability test. I mentioned the idea to the producer and he thought it would look great on video.
You get hundreds of comments on the videos. Do you read them?
Sometimes I see the top-level comments and sometimes Natalia [his wife] reads them to me and laughs. There was a comment from a woman who said, “I want to have your children.” [laughs]. I wrote back and said, “What’s your address? I’ll send them right over!” [laughs].
How do the products for you to test get chosen?
The Epicurious team comes up with a theme, and then they find a list of gadgets. We review them on a Zoom call and out of 10 we might choose five. I’m always drawn to the ones that will have more physical interactions, such as chopping or cutting devices that have a knife or a blade.
We also tend to choose the ones that seem to have the most outrageous claims [tip for companies trying to get their products selected], like it will turn a potato into French fries. I know that is difficult to do and generally those products don’t work.
Initially the Epicurious team chose bizarre gadgets, and I was giving everything a low rating. We decided to add in some devices that we thought would work so that I wouldn’t look grumpy giving so many low ratings.
Have you discovered products you really like and use at home?
There’s a chopper with a round glass bowl with a blade in it. You pull a string like you are starting a lawnmower, and that starts the chopping blades. I was skeptical it would work, and it actually works well.
Also, there’s a cheese and vegetable grater that I use a lot because it will whip through a whole block of Parmesan cheese. It has a crank and the device has suction cups that attach to the counter. We eat Caesar salad a lot.
People comment that they love it that you often eat the food you are using in the tests.
Taking bites of things is part of the job. We started doing that early on, although for a while there were super strict covid rules when nobody could touch anything. There was an episode when we were making hamburgers, and I ate a lot of hamburgers [laughs]. Tasting is funny because taste has nothing to do with the performance of a gadget.
If you had to limit yourself to five kitchen gadgets and a knife, what would you choose?
An aluminum funnel, because I’m always pouring tea into a travel mug or milk into baby bottles. I’d also choose the cheese grater I mentioned, a silicone spatula, a good nonstick frying pan, a 5-inch serrated knife that’s great for cutting bread and vegetables, and spray bottles for olive oil. I’ve bought higher-end spray bottles for olive oil and they jam. Then I bought spray butter in a cheap plastic bottle, and I refill it with olive oil and it works well.
What do you think about the spork: good or bad?
I love the spork mainly because I like saying the word, but it doesn’t really work well as a spoon or a fork.
What’s an everyday item, not necessarily related to cooking, that you would want to redesign to make it better?
I like working on things that no one has thought about for a long time. Ice cube trays are always a struggle and could use a redesign. But, a lot of refrigerators have automatic icemakers now.
You played a role in the creation of the Oxo Good Grips kitchen tools when you were at Smart Design. Did you have any sense they would be as successful as they’ve been?
No. We were a small team of four people. We knew the designs we developed were odd-looking, industrial, big heavy-handled things quite unlike anything else in the kitchen. It was a rush project and we had to get these products ready for a housewares show. We needed to be as efficient as possible, so we put the same handle on many of the tools.
By the time the product was ready to be shown to distributors, we thought with trepidation, what did we just do? Also, the price point was outrageous. Instead of a 75-cent vegetable peeler, this one was close to five dollars, which was quite a leap at that time.
The products got a following when people began using them. At the time, the kitchen tools chain store, Lechters, put a pile of carrots on a table and hung an Oxo peeler from the ceiling. People tried using it and that was a successful way to sell it.
That’s interesting that the handles were all the same to keep the cost of tooling down, because the handles ended up being part of the brand.
Yes. We also created packaging that was black and white, high contrast, with condensed type so the letters could be as tall as possible. What’s interesting is that packaging remains in place today, after 30-something years. It’s unusual for packaging to remain unchanged.
What have we not talked about?
When I talk about usability, one of the things I like discussing is all the things we take for granted because they have been around so long. For example, the alphabet has no reason to be in that order! I teach a course in branding and my part of the course is how design represents the brand. I give the students an assignment to reorder the alphabet in a way that makes more sense. There is no logic to it, as is, other than everyone knows how to sing the song.
Also, music notation is a horrible example of information design. The problem is that when people don’t understand music notation very well, they think they are not good at making music. That’s unfortunate.
Lightening round questions
You make a lot of Caesar salads. Anchovies or no? Anchovies for me, but not for Natalia, although there’s a little bit of anchovy in the dressing.
What’s Natalia’s favorite thing that you cook? Chicken with peanuts. Pancakes are popular around here too.
Real syrup on the pancakes or table syrup? Real maple syrup, warmed up.
Red or black licorice? Black. I don’t think the red stuff is licorice.
Have you had Scandinavian salty black licorice? Yes. And there are some Asian versions as well. Your whole face cringes when you bite one—in a good way, but I wouldn’t eat more than one.
If tomorrow was your birthday and I was going to bake you a cake, which kind should it be? Chocolate with raspberry filling.
You are hosting a dinner party and get to host six people, living or dead. Who is coming and what are you serving? All four Beatles and Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts just before they became super-famous (just before they came to the US). I’d also invite Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens. I may try barbequing.
What’s your favorite piece of art you own? I have a collection of old electric guitars that go back to the 1950s. Here’s one, a 1954 Gretsch Streamliner:
Is there a specific guitar player you admire? There are many, but lately I’m into the super-fast speed playing of country guitarist Jimmy Bryant, dating back to the 1950s
Most captivating museum visit. The Museum August Kestner in Hannover. It was captivating because I was taken into the storage room where they kept their collection pieces that were not currently on display, and was allowed to poke around.
Palate & Palette menu
Here’s what I would serve if Dan and his wife Natalia came for dinner, which they are invited to do:
Brussels Sprouts Caesar Salad
Cochinita Pibil Tacos
Happy as a Gram pie from Pieometry
Great interview Amy. I had not heard of Dan or the videos, and it has reminded me that I need to get a bottle to spray my olive oil. Thanks!