New catering supplies company Cooksmill are calling for a kitchen knife amnesty after discovering more than 50% of people can’t remember when they last bought new kitchen knives.
The Salford based wholesale warehouse and online retailers carried out the survey as they unveil their much anticipated professional knife display, thought to be the largest collection in the region.
As part of their thorough research into the kitchen knives market and selecting the brands they want to stock, the Cooksmill team decided to investigate how often domestic knives are changed.
“Any chef would tell you that a decent knife is crucial to culinary success, and we know professionals take good care of their knifeware,” said a Cooksmill representative. “But we wanted to know if the same applied to home chefs,” he continued. “We will all inevitably have some sort of chopping knife in our kitchen but we wanted to know how often they were replaced with a brand new one.”
Of the 1542 people surveyed, 83 (5.4%) said they changed their kitchen (cooking) knives every year, 288 (18.7%) said every 2-3 years, 359 (23.3%) said every 4-5 years but the majority, 812 (52.7%) of people, said they can’t remember
the last time they bought new knives.
“We were shocked at the results,” the Cooksmill representative continues, “We are urging people to turn in their old, unloved kitchen knives and replace them with a new one!”
The figures are interesting and when broken down into different demographics there are some telling signs.
In terms of age, the group that claimed to change their knives most frequently were 18-24 year olds. 19.2% admitted to an annual replacement. “We think this figure could be caused by people of this age moving out of home for the first time, going to university or perhaps changing their living arrangements more often than other age ranges,” surmises our Cooksmill spokesperson.
Those surveyed in Glasgow and Liverpool returned results of zero in the ‘every year’ category. “We can only assume that Glaswegians and Liverpudlians take great care in their knifeware,” admits the Cooksmill representative. “That, or
they need to think about replacing them with a new one as soon as possible!”
Cooksmill are kitchen knife specialists and supply a huge range of professional knives from Samurai influenced Japanese blades to recognisable household names like Wusthof.
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