Beginning in 1976, the family-owned Grace Manufacturing was in the business of making small photo-etched parts for mechanical computer printers.  After the printer business started to change to laser printers in the early 1990’s, the company had to think outside the box and come up with a new product.

The family was well-trained in the process of photo-etching metals, and, as they had observed many times, the finished products were often exceptionally sharp. The decision to create a rasp was a natural extension of their capabilities. The company was skilled in making tools that required precise cutting edges, and rasps, which are used for shaping wood and other materials, fit within this expertise. Richard Grace and his team set out to make a tall, thin blade with dozens of rounded, razor-sharp, photo-etched edges for carving and shaping wood.

This is how the Microplane went from the garage to the kitchen:

In 1994, annoyed over unusable orange peels, Lorraine Lee rummaged through her husband’s toolbox to find a rasp to zest her orange cake. The result? The orange peel fell like snowflakes. With a stroke of good fortune, Lee was married to Leonard, who was the owner of Lee Valley Tools in Toronto, Canada. The catalog company started marketing the Microplane woodworking tools as food graters. Soon afterward, Grace Manufacturing's Microplane took off. 

"We laughed when people told us they were using our products in their kitchens," recalled Microplane's website and woodworking products manager, Maria Grace, one of Richard Grace's daughters. "But we didn't turn down their orders." Grace Manufacturing pivoted in 1995. Microplane, the wood rasp, sold between $300,000 and $400,000 a year; by 2002, Microplane, the kitchen gadget, did that in a month.

Microplane employs more than 150 people and continues creating tools that cost little more than $10. Everyone, it seems, either has one or knows what it does.