The products we handle include commercial cooking equipment and food delivery tools, including those for school lunches.

As part of their sales activities, they visit elementary and junior high schools as well as kindergartens and nursery schools to conduct surveys and ask teachers (nursery school teachers) about the use of these devices.
During the interview, we heard that there are children who are unable to graduate from training chopsticks or who have developed strange habits.

We began developing learning chopsticks that would allow such children to smoothly transition to regular chopsticks, and the result was our uniquely designed "Learning Chopsticks = First Proper Chopsticks."

During development, we paid particular attention to ensuring that after learning how to use these chopsticks, people could smoothly transition to using regular chopsticks, and that they could correct bad habits that had been acquired using existing corrective chopsticks.

One thing that was particularly difficult was figuring out how to help children use their fingers to use chopsticks when there was no assistive device (a movement that develops the muscles in the fingers).If the fingers are forcibly fixed, there is a possibility that this may be stressful for children.

Therefore, the three things that took up the most time were "considering the material of the assistive device," "designing what shape would be appropriate," and "verifying the hardness of the material."

The completed chopsticks do not come with assistive devices that forcibly hold the fingers in place, but rather with simple, removable assistive devices (kapla). These assistive devices (kapla) can be changed depending on the training stage, and eventually children will be able to use chopsticks properly without the assistive devices. There are many posts on social media of children having fun training, and we are pleased to be able to watch over the children's growth with Nonoji's First Chopsticks.