While cooking in his home in Brooklyn, New York, Yair Reiner decided he was fed up with cleaning food spatter off his stove top — frying meat or simmering marinara sauce always left such a mess.
"A particularly splattersome duck breast drove me to find a solution," he writes on his website.
Reiner ordered heat-resistant silicone paste online and created a cone that would sit inside the rim of a saute pan to keep food confined to the vessel instead of all over his counter.
Today, that product — now called Frywall — has become a business, bringing in over $800,000 in sales in its first year, Reiner says while pitching the product on ABC's "Shark Tank" Sunday. It sells for $21.95 for medium pans and $28.95 for large pans.
"I came up with it because I have always been a home cook. I invented this thing in my kitchen, and then I saw that nothing like it had ever been done," Reiner says on "Shark Tank," seeking $100,000 for a 10 percent stake in the business.
The product is protected by a utility patent, and at the time of the show's taping, it was available at 55 independent retailers. Despite its current success, deciding to pursue the business full-time wasn't an easy decision for Reiner.
"Everything I knew about business, and everything I knew about cooking, told me this could be a really big product," he explains on the show. "But boy it is really hard to leave a paycheck for the great unknown.
"Then, one day I went to work and I found out that the company I was working for was getting sold, my division was getting closed down and I was going to be out of a job," says Reiner, whose LinkedIn profile says he last worked at GE Antares.
So in 2015, he got to work establishing Frywall as a player in the kitchen space.
"Three months after finishing my job, I had a prototype and six months after that, I was out in the market selling," he says.
In April 2017, NBC's "The Today Show" declared Frywall the winner of its "Next Big Thing" competition, landing the product a slot on QVC. It has been featured in gift guides from publications like the Los Angeles Times.
On "Shark Tank," Reiner received offers from both Kevin O'Leary and Daymond John for $100,000 in exchange for 15 percent equity in the business. But, Lori Greiner had something different up her sleeve: an offer to invest at a higher valuation and a piece of gold.
"This is my golden ticket, it's real gold," she says holding up a sliver of metal. "The golden ticket goes to my favorite product I've seen."
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"What this means is I'm going to give you exactly the offer you came in asking for, $100,000 for the 10 percent, and I will also fund your purchase orders, giving you a line of credit indefinitely," she explains.
John countered to match Greiner's offer of $100,000 for 10 percent, but instead of a golden ticket, he offered to throw in his "gold tooth from high school." O'Leary offered a guitar pick from his pocket.
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Jokes aside, Reiner chose to accept Greiner's offer and take home her golden ticket.
"When I lost my job, I could have gone to look for another job in an industry I didn't like anymore, but I followed my dream," he says. "Lori is the one who can get the product on TV, she can get it into stores and I think with her this product is going to go everywhere really, really fast."
