When TIME Magazine released its list of the 100 most influential new inventions for 2025, staff at Thunderstruck Ag Equipment in Winkler, Man., were surprised to learn they had earned the Thunderstruck Ag TIME award, with one of their products securing a spot on the prestigious list.
The company was contacted this summer by Time and invited to nominate its unique Razors Edge combine concave to be considered for recognition.
“We weren’t aware they recognized inventions every year. After we won two awards at Ag in Motion, they reached out and asked if we were interested in applying. So we applied. It was that simple.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Winkler-based Thunderstruck Ag Equipment has added a nod from Time, following their innovation award win at Ag in Motion earlier this year.
The Razor’s Edge concave beat out five other nominations in the agriculture category.
At Ag in Motion this year, Matuszewski praised the unique design of the concave line, focused more around “how the material flows through a combine,”
The concave line is built around individual combine models and engineered to improve cleaning, separation, and multi-crop performance without hardware swaps. Farmers can run a slower rotor speed with wider concave clearance, gaining more efficient operation and lower fuel costs. The company’s website even invites operators to “say goodbye to the hassle of cover plates.” It’s this level of simplicity and performance, now highlighted by the Thunderstruck Ag TIME award, that’s helping more producers see the value in the Razors Edge design.
Features include a tighter design on the point of the concave with greatest crop impact. Material posted by the company points to lower grain loss during harvest due to fewer bottlenecks in material flow and, in general, better ability to “keep material flow smooth and consistent —no more overloads or downtime.”
Thunderstruck Ag TIME Award: A History of Wins
It’s not clear if winning the awards at AIM was what brought the concaves to Time’s attention, but, “the timing was pretty particular,” Matuszewski says.
Key prerequisites for nomination were that the product had to be new and commercialized this year and found to be making a difference in the market, Matuszewski recalls about the application process.
On its website, the magazine writes that it has been compiling its list of the “most impactful new products and ideas in Time’s Best Inventions issue” since 2000. It adds that editors evaluated each contender on “a number of key factors, including originality, efficacy, ambition and impact.”
In all, the magazine recognized 300 of what it terms groundbreaking inventions and 100 special mention inventions across a wide variety of categories. Aside from the recognition and publicity, there is no other reward for the winners.
The final list was announced in early October and the winners will be published in the November print edition.
“They put one (winner) on the cover,” says Matuszewski of the upcoming November issue.
“It is a housekeeping robot. It’s pretty cool. But you can order a cover they’ll ship to you with your invention on it. But it’s not the actual cover.
“Anytime you win an award adds more credibility to the product, but how the product performs is ultimately going to dictate the sales and ultimate growth of that product.”
Time’s list can be found online at time.com/collections/best-inventions-2025