Throughout day-to-day life, people come up with ideas and solutions to the problems they face.
Some are small, like grabbing milk for your morning coffee cause there’s no more cream in the fridge.
But sometimes the ideas that come to mind have lasting effects that ripple outwards far more than initially anticipated. All a person has to do is chase them.
Jeremy Matuszewski and his crew at Thunderstruck Ag Equipment in Winkler have been chasing one such idea for the better part of a decade.
That hard work has paid off, as their Razors Edge Concaves have just been recognized on the international stage as part of TIME Magazine’s Top 300 Inventions of 2025.
Where did it begin?
In 2016, Matuszewski started working with farmers around harvest.
Traditional concaves — the part of a combine that helps thresh and separate grain — require adjustments for each crop and combine brand. Matuszewski wanted to develop a solution that could adapt to different crops and machine models without constant modifications.
“Every concave that’s on the market right now, the spacing is uniform,” he explained. “So, my thought was, how can we create one concave that’ll do all crops without changing anything?”
Finding the design
Through years of research and collaboration with farmer-inventors, Matuszewski and his team experimented with variable spacing designs that account for how material flows differently in Case and John Deere combines.
“Where the material hits in a Case, because it’s completely different than a John Deere… we put spacing tighter. We made it a variable spacing pattern on the right side of a Case machine but the left side of a John Deere machine,” he said.
Prototypes were first tested internationally in Australia, with results far surpassing their initial expectations.
Canola and lentil harvests saw combines running faster while losing minimal grain. These successes led Matuszewski to begin the patent process in May of 2024 and to scale testing across North America.
How the market’s responded
The launch followed intensive preparation, which included setting up branding, marketing, and selecting a manufacturer. Matuszewski said that they settled on a manufacturer in Illinois, which happened to help them navigate potential tariff issues.
By November 2024, pre-orders had already reached $500,000, even before the first units were built.
“Farmers looked at it and they’re like, yeah, we want it,” Matuszewski said.
Since its launch, Razors Edge Concaves has shipped 400 sets worldwide and has continued to receive feedback to refine the design. The product has already won multiple industry awards, including the Innovation Award and the Farmer’s Choice Award at Ag in Motion 2025.
Global recognition
When TIME reached out initially, Matuszewski disregarded the email entirely.
“I thought it was spam. We had received an email just saying ‘Congratulations on winning these awards, we’ve been following your product… I sent it off to Lucy on our team, and she came back. She says, ‘This isn’t spam.’”
They then submitted through the application process, and recognition by TIME magazine came shortly after. “We received an email saying ‘Congratulations, we’ve selected your invention as one of our top 300 inventions’,” Matuszewski said.
“It’s a hometown company story…” – Jeremy Matuszewski
Support from the community
The recognition is an achievement, to be sure, but Matuszewski attributed their success to the people who surround him.
“It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s a whole other thing to get to a level where you launch. And I didn’t do any of that. All of the branding? I had no part in that; our marketing team did that. Purchasing team worked with the manufacturer, Lucy applied for all of these awards,” he said, “It’s such a team effort to get to that point.”
He also credits the local businesses and colleagues that surround them, for helping the small company grow from a two-person operation in a 10-by-10-foot office to a 25-person team in Winkler, plus a new facility in Brazil.
“It’s a hometown company story… we started 12 years ago with nothing, and now we’re manufacturing concaves in Brazil,” he said.
To take a look at Thunderstruck’s Razors Edge Concave feature in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025, click here.