Microplane originally manufactured rasps for woodworking. Eventually it was a Canadian housewife who paved the way for the manufacture of kitchen tools when she set about baking a cake. Frustrated with her old, blunt grater, she took her husband's Microplane wood rasp from his tool box and was amazed at the excellent grating result. A sophisticated manufacturing process, perfected throughout 40 years of first-hand experience, makes Microplane products so amazingly successful. An innovative photo-etching process is applied to fashion the teeth. Unlike stamped teeth, etched contours do not have any burr, achieve long service life and are extremely sharp. The appliances cut the food with surgical precision, allowing the ingredients to preserve their full aroma and taste, and avoiding the crushing produced by many standard graters.