As a child attending the Torch Trail Bible Camp, one of the activities Dianne Carlson would take part in is making dough boys – putting dough on a stick and cooking it over the campfire.
From that experience, the Tobin Lake resident invented the Tortedo, a stainless steel campfire cooking utensil that has a large cone-shaped knob for the dough. The resulting pastry is shaped in such a way that it can be filled with ingredients like fruit and whipped cream, or scrambled eggs and vegetables.
“Basically, I kept the idea in the back of my head. We made some while raising my kids, out of a wood stick, when we were camping,” she said. “I was watching the Dragon’s Den and it inspired me to start finding places it could be manufactured, design patented and trademarked.”
The first thing Carlson worked on was the design, creating 3-D images in order to patent the device.
“When I showed it to people, they all thought it was a cool idea and it was going to fly, so the more positive feedback I got, the more inspired I got, so I just kept going until it finally got it patented.”
After that, Carlson had to work to come up with a name. In a brainstorming session, her husband threw out Tortedo, which, besides having the sound of ‘dough’ within it, didn’t have any prior significance.
“We actually had a couple of names before that and we couldn’t trademark them because they were too close to another company’s product, so we couldn’t use those names.”
Then, after everything was protected so that no one else could steal the idea, it was time to manufacture the utensil.
Carlson has been selling the resulting stock of Tortedo since last summer on the Internet and through word-of-mouth during her spare time. She and her husband run the Serenity Bay Resort on Tobin Lake. Sales have been going well.
Now, Carlson is working to increase public awareness of the utensil, educating people about what a Tortedo is and what it does, in order to improve sales.
