Photo by Karola G on Pexels.
Open a kitchen drawer almost anywhere in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Finland and you will find one: a short handle, a blade set into a narrow slot at an angle, no moving parts, nothing to plug in. It looks too simple to be an invention worth naming. And yet the ostehøvel — Norwegian for “cheese plane,” known in English as the cheese slicer — has quietly done more to shape how Scandinavians eat breakfast than almost any other object in the region’s history. In 2025 it turned one hundred years old, and in that century it has been copied, exported, and stashed in kitchen drawers on every continent, largely unchanged from the day a carpenter in a small town north of Oslo first patented it.
The Problem With Cutting Cheese Like Everyone Else
Before 1925, Norwegians sliced their cheese the way most of the world still does: with a knife. For soft cheese that works well enough. For the dense, semi-hard cheeses that dominate Nordic breakfast tables — and especially for brunost, Norway’s caramelised brown cheese — a knife is a genuinely bad tool. Brunost is sticky, dense, and unevenly textured, and pressing a blade straight down through it tends to produce a crumbling, wasteful mess rather than a clean slice. Anyone who has tried to get a thin, even piece of brunost onto a slice of bread with an ordinary knife knows the frustration first-hand.
That frustration belonged, in the early 1920s, to a carpenter named Thor Bjørklund, who ran a small workshop in Lillehammer, in Norway’s Gudbrandsdalen valley. Bjørklund had trained as a cabinetmaker, studied at the Arts and Crafts school in Oslo, and worked for years as a master carpenter — someone who thought, professionally, in terms of blades, angles, and planed wood. According to his own account, he had long been irritated by how badly a knife handled cheese, and one day the solution arrived from an unlikely place: the carpenter’s plane sitting on his own workbench.
A Carpenter’s Plane, Turned Sideways
A wood plane works by holding a blade at a fixed, shallow angle so that it shaves off a thin, even layer of material with each pass, rather than gouging or splitting it. Bjørklund’s insight was to shrink that exact mechanism down to kitchen scale: a small blade, angled and set into a slot, dragged across the surface of a cheese block instead of a plank of wood. Pulled correctly, it produces a slice of near-perfectly consistent thickness every time, no matter how dense or crumbly the cheese underneath. He patented the design on 27 February 1925 — a date Norwegian retailers and museums quietly marked as a centenary just last year.
From a Lillehammer Workshop to Sixty Million Kitchens
Bjørklund did not sit on the idea. In 1927 he founded the company that still bears his name, Thor Bjørklund & Sønner AS, and began manufacturing the cheese slicer in Lillehammer at commercial scale. The tool spread first through Norway, then across the rest of Scandinavia, and eventually well beyond it. By some estimates, more than sixty million ostehøvel have been manufactured and sold worldwide since production began — an extraordinary number for a single-purpose kitchen implement with essentially no moving parts to wear out or replace. The original company is still making them in Lillehammer today, now operating as a subsidiary of Gudbrandsdal Industrier AS.
The tool never won a formal popularity contest against Norway’s other inventions — a 2011 national poll run by Norwegian broadcaster NRK, in partnership with the country’s patent office, crowned the artificial nitrogen fertiliser process developed by Kristian Birkeland and Sam Eyde as Norway’s most important invention. But no other Norwegian invention shows up on more breakfast tables, in more countries, every single morning of the year.
Why Nobody Has Improved the Design in a Century
Perhaps the most telling fact about the ostehøvel is how little it has changed. Manufacturers today make versions in stainless steel, in oiled oak, in walnut, in coloured plastic for the mass market — but the fundamental mechanism Bjørklund patented in 1925 is untouched. There is no motor to make it faster, no adjustable settings, no smart features. It solved its one problem so completely that a century of kitchen-gadget innovation has found nothing meaningful to add.
That kind of quiet, permanent solution to an ordinary problem turns out to be something of a recurring theme in Scandinavian design. It shows up in the story of Fjällräven’s Kånken backpack, another everyday object built to solve one specific, unglamorous problem that ended up barely changing for decades. It is, in a sense, the same instinct behind the broader Nordic design principle of form following function that has made so many Scandinavian objects into long-lived design classics rather than disposable products: solve the actual problem, elegantly, once, and stop.
How to Actually Use One
For anyone who has only ever seen an ostehøvel on a hotel breakfast buffet and assumed it was a strange miniature spatula, the technique takes about thirty seconds to learn. Hold the slicer roughly perpendicular to the block of cheese, blade resting flat against the cut edge, and drag it toward you in a single smooth motion rather than sawing back and forth. The blade shaves off one thin, even slice with each pull. Pressing down too hard produces a slice that is too thick or tears; a light, confident pass produces the paper-thin, evenly rippled slices you see stacked on a Norwegian breakfast table alongside lefse and other staples. Most Norwegians will tell you it takes a few tries to get a feel for the right pressure — and that once you have it, a knife starts to feel hopelessly clumsy by comparison.
A Century On, Still Doing Its One Job
It would be easy to overlook the ostehøvel entirely — it has no brand recognition outside Scandinavia, no marketing budget, no design award on record. But a hundred years after Thor Bjørklund patented it in a small workshop in Lillehammer, it remains one of the most quietly successful inventions to ever come out of Norway: a tool that solved a genuinely annoying everyday problem so completely that improving on it has never seemed worth trying. The next time a thin, even slice of brunost lands on your bread, you have a Norwegian cabinetmaker with a carpenter’s plane to thank for it.
