Appetite for invention: Seattle tech vets hatch a simple gadget to cook a tastier chicken
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PoulTree co-founders Dave Atchison, left, and Tony Smith, with a freshly cooked chicken suspended on their invention at the startup's facility in Seattle's Interbay neighborhood. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Not satisfied with what they considered overly complicated methods for cooking unsatisfactory chicken, Dave Atchison and Tony Smith jumped out of the frying pan and into the startup fire.
The two tech veterans and longtime friends — experienced in Seattle's e-commerce and high-tech cooking scenes — are the co-founders of PoulTree, an idea so simple it should make your mouth water, whether you're an inventor at heart or you just love the taste of a perfectly roasted bird.
PoulTree is a precisely bent rod made from 3/8-inch marine-grade stainless steel. It's designed to fit into the hole in the handle of a cast iron skillet and, after a couple angled turns, through the midsection of a chicken. Propped in the air on a rigid 'pole' of sorts, the bird-over-pan cooks evenly as heat flows around and through it convection style.
There's no rotisserie spinning the chicken in circles, no associated app managing the time or temperature of another expensive kitchen gadget. It's just a $20 rod, a pan, high heat from a grill or oven, and an appetite to create something new.
'This is analog cooking,' Smith said.
Freedom to tinker
A roast chicken made on a PoulTree rod over a cast iron skillet filled with potatoes on GeekWire reporter Kurt Schlosser's home grill. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
In a nondescript warehouse space tucked into Seattle's Interbay neighborhood, Atchison and Smith operate a workshop mixed with a test kitchen and an order fulfillment business.
'I've had a very fortunate career here in Seattle,' said Atchison, who was the fourth employee at Zulily, where he served as senior VP of marketing during nearly six years at the once mighty online retailer. From there, he started marketing tech company New Engen in 2016, which later sold to a private equity company.
After taking some time and considering what to do next, Atchison began looking for a space to spread out and explore different ideas. Coming up with a better way to roast chicken wasn't even on his list.
'It's amazing what happens when you have the creative freedom to kind of tinker and do things,' he said.
Smith spent 12 years at Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, Wash.-based innovation hub created by former Microsoft researcher and Modernist Cuisine guru Nathan Myhrvold. Smith was responsible for IV's occupational safety and health, and later, facilities operations. He also has a cooking background and is a Washington wine connoisseur, which led to supporting more of Myhrvold's events and projects.
Dave Atchison, right, demonstrates how he and Tony Smith tested weight limits for PoulTree rods using different size exercise weights. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Smith said Myhrvold always talked about his roast chicken and the super-intensive process and science of cooking a perfect bird. Rather than hanging a chicken inside an oven, Smith started experimenting with a free-standing contraption to hold the bird aloft. The device sat inside a skillet, but was unwieldy.
Smith and Atchison are also not fans of beer can chicken, a very popular upright cooking method that they say robs the bird of heat during a process that is supposed to be all about thermodynamics.
During lunch with food technologist Scott Heimendinger, Smith mentioned what he was up to, and Heimendinger suggested trying something stuck in the pan's handle.
'I came back to the shop, and Dave has all the tooling here,' Smith said, pointing to a metal rod bender. 'And then we just made a prototype. And in 10 minutes it freaking worked.'
Then they spent a year trying to make it better — and couldn't. People suggested making a clamp to hold the rod to the pan.
'It just kept getting more complicated. And we kept coming back to Occam's razor,' Smith said.
'The simplest way is essentially the best. We proved it to ourselves,' Atchison agreed.
Looking for a sales boost
Tony Smith shows off a shipment of PoulTree rods from the company's manufacturer in Michigan. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
PoulTree had its first sale in late September. The two entrepreneurs — who are bootstrapping the venture — bent the steel for the first few hundred orders themselves, but now PoulTree is made in Michigan by a car parts manufacturer.
Skillets are sourced from Tennessee-based Lodge Cast Iron, via Amazon. While a rod alone is $20, a PoulTree Skillet Roaster package — containing a rod and 10-inch skillet — is $50. PoulTree also offers a metal hole reamer for $5. The tool allows cooks to enlarge the skillet handle hole just enough to fit the rod.
Other products include a stand that looks like a chicken foot, a double PoulTree that can roast two chickens, and a Gobbler XL PoulTree and pan for turkeys. The startup, which has applied for a patent, has sent packages all over the world — from Alaska to Australia. They're also working on new packaging to support physical retail store sales.
'Sales are coming in but it's nothing crazy,' Atchison said. 'We think this next Thanksgiving could be really solid.'
In PoulTree's Seattle HQ, Dave Atchison shows where the company packages customer orders. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
While they do have a social media presence on TikTok, Instagram and elsewhere, the founders are hopeful for a celebrity chef endorsement or viral video that would do wonders for marketing traction.
In the meantime, PoulTree is satisfying a fun and interesting niche for the two friends — part of which they previously found through tech, and part they didn't. Smith said coming up with the idea was inventive and technical, as they had to figure out how to make it work.
'I've been kind of looking for that ever since I left [Intellectual Ventures],' Smith said. 'It's hard to find something that takes advantage of the years of experience and things I learned there. That was a unique place.'
Atchison is hooked on the creativity of his new venture, and the intimacy of connecting with customers.
'They're buying, they're providing feedback, they're doing reviews. That's a really great thing, and something that I think people in tech miss, because you're not as close to the customer,' he said. 'The part of tech that is awesome is the scale. So we're trying to find that.'
Taste test
I ate a lot of chicken for this story.
Smith and Atchison served me a freshly roasted bird straight off their Big Green Egg grill, and I watched another one cook on their standard Weber. Grilling a 5-pounder at 500 degrees for one hour is all it takes, with fat drippings from the chicken into the skillet providing the perfect base for a round of roasted potatoes.
Home chefs can do the same in their kitchen oven, though I'm told the splattering mess is not fun to clean up.
The chicken at PoulTree HQ was peel-apart perfect — from wing to breast to thigh. The meat was juicy and the skin was crispy and salty.
I took a PoulTree rod and Lodge skillet home that night and my wife seasoned a chicken she bought that day so we could test the process and try to replicate it ourselves. Assembly was a snap, and our grill handled the hot job.
An hour later, I was sold again: simple really is better.
As kitchens grow crowded with smart devices and AI-powered everything, PoulTree is proving there's still space for analog solutions. Smith and Atchison didn't reinvent the wheel — just the way you roast a chicken on it.
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