Most chefs spend hours cooking so that they can send out dishes to hungry diners in fewer than 15 minutes. But while a restaurant’s goal is always to send out well-prepared meals in a hurry, ingredient prep can be a lengthy process that most restaurants would love to shorten. Who wouldn’t want to trim down the time it takes to cube cheeses or slice garnishes? 

This was Nemco’s primary goal in creating its line of food preparation tools. Since the 1970s, the company has been committed to creating tools, from spiralizers to fry cutters, that simplify prep while saving time and diminishing food waste. Here, we’ll share six of our favorite Nemco tools sure to speed your prep time:

Easy Cheeser 

If you need cubes, squares, slices, or rectangles of cheese for cooking, baking, or serving, you likely had to have a chef manually chop cheeses by hand. Specifically, the Easy Cheeser can do the work of 20 minutes of manual chopping of a five-pound block of cheese in just 75 seconds. The consistent cutting arm also gives you more precision than you could replicate by hand. 

Easy Chopper 3 

The Easy Chopper 3 is a time-saving tool because it lets you cut vegetables of all sizes with a single clean movement of the chopping apparatus. With color-coded blade sets, you can dice, slice, or cube a variety of vegetables or fruits that you’d otherwise have to chop by hand. Conveniently, too, Easy Chopper is set up so that chopped foods will automatically fall into food pans, rather than forcing you to take an extra step. 

Easy Onion Slicer 2 

While other types of onion slicers might be time-saving in the short term, other models likely need more repair than Nemco’s version, with its factory-pretensioned blade set that never needs tightening. With the Easy Onion Slicer 2, you can slice onions up to 4-inches in diameter, but despite its name, this tool can also slice other types of produce, as well. 

Easy Slicer Vegetable Slicer 

Professional slicing tools can fall short of expectations when they are one-size-fits-all tools, instead of convertible, changeable machines. That’s what the Easy Slicer Vegetable Slicer offers – you can easily change out the blades to transform your cuts from 1/16-inch to 1/2-inch. Not only is the cutting lightning fast, but also you can transform your cut width quickly and easily. 

ShrimpPro 2000® Power Shrimp Cutter & Deveiner

If there’s a more arduous tool in the kitchen than de-veining shrimp, we haven’t heard of it. Luckily, the ShrimpPro 2000 is lightning fast – it can de-vein 6,000 shrimp in only an hour. But this tool doesn’t just de-vein, either; it also cuts, butterflies, or splits the shrimp in that same time-frame. The tool works with shrimp of all sizes. 

Easy Vegetable Noodler

One of the most popular carb replacements these days is spiralized noodles. While these noodles are beloved as pasta replacement, pasta will remain a front-runner in terms of prep time. Unless you’ve got the Easy Vegetable Noodler, of course. The tool works on firm vegetables that you might want to turn into noodles, including carrots, zucchini, and squash. But this tool works where a traditional spiralizer might fail – it requires little to no effort to create pounds of this low-calorie pasta alternative.

As many line cooks mention, the most efficient food prep requires cooks to focus on the task at hand. Don’t try to multitask; if you do, you’ll move more slowly and be more likely to mess up. This is the genius of Nemco tools – they help you focus on a single task through to its completion without incurring the typical painful problems that come with repetitive motion.