Gliding from classroom to market
Delivering beer and other beverages to bars in Boston and other cities with old infrastructure — where many storage cellars have no elevator access — can damage workers’ health and businesses’ bottom line. Repeatedly bouncing 160-pound kegs down flights of stairs can cause chronic injury for delivery professionals, resulting in time off work, and the impacts can damage the stairs and break the hand truck. In 2012, a team of students in MIT’s well-known product-design class, Course 2.009, invented a hand truck with fold-out treads and a braking system that made hauling kegs downstairs safer and easier. Now that hand truck, which launched commercially in April and is called the Glyde, is already being used by hundreds of people worldwide. And the MIT spinout selling the product, ELL Operations (ELLO), has landed major partnerships with Anheuser Busch InBev and leading hand-truck manufacturer Magliner. “With a few hundred Glydes already out in the...