Forging Ahead: Three JWU Grads and a Cutting-Edge Knife Startup

What can two savvy 20-somethings achieve in the world of handcrafted Japanese-style kitchen knives in less than eight years? Quite a bit it turns out.

Forge To Table, a business conceived in a first-year student's room at JWU, has completed 20,000 online orders since 2017. Its CEO, Noah Rosen ’19, was named to the Forbes “30 under 30” food and drink list. The company’s knives are in restaurants, hotels, private homes and cruise ships all over the world. The Cheesecake Factory and Casamigos use their products, and they’ve established brand partnerships with DirectTV, Ecolab and Dole & Bailey.

Born in a Dorm

Rosen has had a knack for culinary entrepreneurship from an early age. He started a food blog at 12, a catering company at 15 and a pop-up eatery by 17, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he launched a successful kitchen knife business while still a teenager in college.

Forge To Table (FTT) began with a chance meeting. On school break his first year, at a housewares show in Chicago, Rosen met Carole Zheng who was selling knives hand-made by her husband, Alex, a third-generation craftsman from China who mastered Japanese-style forging in Seki, Japan. The two chatted about the forging process (shaping a metal object through heat) and the Zheng family business; they hit it off.

“I’d already been cooking seriously for years by then, and I’d really learned to love Japanese-style knives. I loved the quality and craftsmanship of what Carole had to offer,” explains Rosen, who double majored in Culinary Arts and Food & Beverage Entrepreneurship.

Never one to dream small, Rosen thought perhaps he could help to design an affordable, quality knife for import to the U.S and become the family’s North American business partner. Back at JWU, he received knife samples from the Zhengs and tested and tweaked the design. He brought samples of that knife to JWU’s Club of Culinary Excellence to get feedback from his peers and faculty advisors and sold his first knife to a student in his Plated Desserts class.

That was the birth of the FTT 8" Gyuto knife, a Japanese-style steel chef’s knife with a thin curved blade. (It’s still FTT’s best seller, retailing at $104.) Classmates kept asking how they could get the knife, so Rosen took out a small loan to have his first batch of 200 Gyuto knives made. He had no formalized business plan yet, and the Zhengs’ operation in China was so small it took six months to deliver the order.

Rosen continued to sell knives to classmates and launched a store on Etsy, but it was Chef Ray McCue, Rosen’s Restaurant Foundations class instructor, who suggested selling to Stock, a culinary goods store in Providence.

The store agreed to take a handful. Rosen left the store and 25 minutes later received a call that they needed more knives! Building on that momentum, Rosen created a formal business and marketing plan and launched the Forge To Table website in his second year at the university. 

“My entrepreneurship professors, Daniel Feinberg and Ezenwayi Amaechi Ejiribe, provided such incredible mentorship and guidance to me as I was fumbling through starting all of this and really put us on the path to success.” That was an enormous piece of the puzzle, says Rosen, who officially partnered with the Zheng family in 2017. As well as helping to design the knives, which the family forges in Asia, he handles marketing and distribution from his FTT office in Southern California.

A Right-Hand Man

Every effective CEO needs a right-hand person. For Rosen, Sam Burgess ’18 became that valued colleague and thought partner.

“Noah and I were kind of rivals at first,” says Burgess, who earned his bachelor’s in Culinary Nutrition, Food Science and Product Development at JWU. “Noah was the president of the Club of Culinary Excellence, while I was the president of Cooking Asia. These two clubs historically fight over members and meeting space, so I raised my eyebrow a bit when meeting him.”

The rivalry was short lived. The two worked together to ensure the clubs could share space and through that built an enduring friendship. In 2019, Burgess joined the FTT team as vice-president of culinary and outreach.

Burgess currently leads the sales team and represents the company at pop-up markets, culinary competitions, live demos and fundraising events. During COVID, Burgess was the brains behind the launch of the company’s test kitchen, where he works to create new recipes featuring FTT knives.

“In the thick of COVID, people were home looking for something great to make for dinner, and Sam had the brilliant idea to turn the cooking he was already doing into easy-to-make recipes for all these new home cooks,” explains Rosen, who notes that the COVID years saw their highest sales numbers.

Growing the Company

The latest JWU addition to the FTT team, Maya Alderman ’23, had known Rosen and Burgess by reputation long before meeting them.

“Noah is kind of a legend at JWU, so I knew all about him and his inspiring story. JWU entrepreneurship classes have been known to feature the company — [with its] name redacted — as a case study,” says Alderman. She met Burgess when he returned to campus for a dumpling event at the Cooking Asia club.

When COVID hit at the close of Alderman’s first year, she returned home with an “excess of creative juices flowing,” she says, so she purchased a camera, started taking photographs of executed recipes and posted them on her Instagram account (@kuishinbo_maya).