We’re targeting our wood burning cook stove at countries where deforestation is a major problem.  Wait…a wood burning stove is going to help in the fight against deforestation?

At first glance, this seems like a really bad idea.  Other technologies like gasification are more efficient and can use almost any organic material, but there are 2 major problems: they’re unfamiliar and they’re more expensive.

Of the women we’re designing our stove for, very few have ever cooked on anything other than an open flame.  As you can imagine, when you do something one way your whole life, you get quite good at it.  The further a technology is from a simple open fire, the less familiar it is, which translates to our users trusting it less initially.

The other problem is up front cost and risk of new technologies.  Most of the stoves that are available in the area don’t last very long because they’re made cheaply (thin metal) or use fragile materials (ceramics).  Users will pay up to a couple dollars for these stoves, and not get more than a couple months use from them.  This is why the marketing aspect is so important.

But marketing can only take you so far; you can’t get someone to pay a month (or more) of their salary for a stove–no matter how technically superior it is.  And even with great marketing, it’s hard to convince someone to cook in a manner that’s completely alien to them.  This is why we’ve developed a stove that’s more efficient and which looks high tech, but that fits pretty seamlessly into the existing cooking culture.

We do believe that there’s a place for gassifiers, solar cookers, etc.  But we also believe the best way to get there is baby steps.