Four Crowdfunded Kitchen Gadgets Put to the Test: Back or Sack?

Introduction

Crowdfunded kitchen gadgets often promise to solve problems you didn’t know you had. We put four of the most talked-about recent launches through hands-on testing: a reusable silicone food bag, a stretchable storage container, a dedicated soft-boiled egg maker, and a robotic drawing board. Here is how each one performed, what it costs, and whether it earns a place in your kitchen.

What We Tested

Each gadget was judged on whether it does what its campaign claims, how well-built it feels, and whether the asking price makes sense for what you get. Two of the four come from the same brand, DeliOne, a Red Dot Award winner focused on sustainable food storage.

DeliOne Bamboo Seal Sustainable Food Bag

The bamboo seal food bag is made of 100% platinum silicone, a non-fossil-based material the brand describes as high purity, high transparency and high temperature tolerance, making it safe for food contact. The claim is bold: reusable over 5,000 times, replacing disposable plastic bags entirely. The bamboo seal itself uses fast-growing sustainable grass rather than plastic.

In use, the bags are genuinely free-standing, so you can pour boiling water straight in without holding the bag open or wedging it around a glass. The seal is tight, and squeezing air out is easy. You can freeze in them, microwave them, and even reheat leftovers in hot water as a boil-in-the-bag option. They also lay flat, which keeps food away from the rim so nothing sticky builds up.

Testing backed the versatility: scrambled eggs cooked in a pouch in boiling water came out well, a pudding mixture reheated cleanly in the microwave, and stew reheated in the oven wiped clean afterwards, since silicone residue is far easier to wash than baked-on oven dish grime. One thing to weigh up: the set of three cost £31, and since you will realistically want a rotating collection of several bags for freezing, chilling and storing, the total adds up quickly.

DeliOne Flex’n Fresh Container

The Flex’n Fresh container pairs a clear body with a patented stretchable lid that can increase the container’s volume by 50% and extend to 200% of its height. The idea is to handle awkwardly shaped food that normal containers cannot accommodate.

The lid clicks shut with a satisfying, confident seal, and it is airtight. In testing, a small whole chicken fit inside with some jigsaw-style persuasion, and a pineapple could be wedged in too, though that was pushing it. The seal is also genuinely leak proof and smell proof: a fish stew inside produced no odour, and the sealed container even shrugged off being run with and held upside down without leaking.

The main trade-off is stacking. Traditional containers stack neatly in the fridge, but once these are filled with bulbous contents, that efficiency disappears. The verdict from our testers was that the flexible lid solves a problem that may not have needed solving: a larger conventional container often achieves the same result. The set of two cost £25.

Eggbath

The Eggbath is a small plastic basket with a lid and fill lines, designed to produce soft-boiled eggs with delicate whites and creamy yolks. You add boiling water up to one of four lines, pop in room-temperature eggs, cover, and let residual heat do the work. More water means a firmer egg. It can hold up to four eggs, though the brand recommends cooking two at a time, and a drain feature makes emptying easy.

The theory is sound but execution is fussy. Results depend heavily on egg temperature going in, egg size, and room temperature, so it takes a few attempts to dial in. In our tests the whites consistently overcooked and stuck to the shell while the yolks stayed warm and jammy. That jammy yolk is genuinely lovely over a rice bowl, but the white never reached the delicate, custardy texture the campaign promises, because boiling water in direct contact inevitably cooks the outside white well past the target.

At £19 for what is essentially a moulded plastic basket, the value feels thin compared to simply poaching eggs or timing a conventional boil. If you want a precisely cooked soft egg, a water-bath approach that holds the whole egg at one temperature is the more reliable route.

Joto Robotic Drawing Board

The most unusual entry here is barely a kitchen gadget at all. Joto is a connected display that draws with a real pen: send a sketch or message from the companion app and the robotic pen reproduces it on the whiteboard surface. It has a built-in eraser and dock so the pen never dries out, and it refreshes the surface when it is time for something new.

Watching it work is genuinely mesmerising, and the drawing accuracy is impressive. The kitchen use case is real: a wipeable digital whiteboard for recipes, shopping lists, to-do lists and menus, plus the ability to send notes to family remotely. The company behind it, Those, is a London-based design studio aiming to connect the digital world to the physical world through pen and ink rather than a screen, and Joto won the Beazley Design of the Year public vote at the Design Museum.

Caveats to know before buying. The Android app proved elusive despite Store and Google Play listings, which may frustrate non-Apple households. As a list tool, existing note apps do more for less; Joto earns its keep only as ever-changing personalised artwork or playful notes. It also carried a hefty early-bird price of £339, though it performed more reliably than most techy gadgets of this type after a slightly clunky calibration.

Overall Buying Advice

If sustainable food storage appeals to you, the DeliOne bamboo seal bags are the strongest all-rounder here: they genuinely handle freezing, microwaving, oven reheating and hot-water reheating, just budget for buying several over time. The Flex’n Fresh container works well as an airtight, odour-proof and leak-proof vessel, but only buy it if a conventional container truly will not fit your food. Skip the Eggbath unless you love the gimmick; conventional methods give more consistent soft eggs. The Joto is the fun wildcard: delightful to watch and well made, but only worth it if you see it as a living artwork piece rather than a kitchen tool.

Conclusion

Of the four, only the reusable silicone food bags earned consistent praise across the board, while the robotic drawing board split opinion as a charming but pricey toy. The stretchable container and the egg bath both fell into the category of clever solutions to problems that cheaper, simpler tools already solve. Match your purchase to a real need, and none of these will disappoint quite as much as they would bought on impulse.