Q&A with Chris Martin ’05

Step into your kitchen and take a look around. Chances are, there’s a Ninja™ appliance on your counter. From blenders and coffee makers to ice cream machines and pizza ovens, Ninja products are known for being innovative, durable, and versatile — the result of years of research and development by teams of engineers and designers. Chris Martin ’05 is one of the minds behind them. As director of Ninja’s Heated Research and Development division, Chris has spent nearly a decade creating appliances that have changed how we cook. Most recently, he led the team behind the Ninja™ FlexFlame™, the company’s first propane-powered device, capable of grilling, smoking, roasting, griddling, and baking pizza — all in one. From building precision sensors for aircraft to engineering high-performance kitchen tools, Chris has built a career at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and everyday life.

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What do you love about working at SharkNinja?
One of my favorite parts about working at Ninja is the food we have at our disposal. Every product we make is tested against our benchmark recipes — it has to meet a high standard. If it doesn’t, we fix it. We have food scientists and chefs working alongside our engineering teams to assess products and identify gaps. It's up to my team to address any performance deficiencies. Since we typically have about ten cooking products in development at once, there’s always plenty of food to go around. We also have days when celebrity chefs come in to experiment with our products. Those are the days you want to frequent the kitchen — they turn out restaurant-quality dishes, and we get to enjoy them.

What does a typical day look like?
My day involves coordinating all of the projects I oversee and making sure no one is stuck or waiting on anything. I also anticipate potential problems and think about how to address them. A big part of my role is communicating with leadership — not just flagging issues, but ensuring they know we have a clear plan to resolve them.

How has your career progressed at SharkNinja? 
I started working on improving legacy products, addressing product deficiencies or pain points that consumers had called out. When Ninja set out to reinvigorate their cooking space, I moved into research and development. At the time, they were known for their blenders, but they wanted to become a household name for cooking and heating products — to revolutionize the market. I was part of the initial team charged with developing something novel by combining a pressure cooker and an air fryer. These were two completely different products with different engineering requirements, and it was my job to analyze competitor products and determine what was needed to create a functional, reliable device. It was an exciting opportunity for me to prove myself. The product performed really well and launched Ninja's entire Foodi ® line.

From there, I began overseeing our indoor grilling line. After a few years, when Ninja wanted to enter the outdoor market, I started leading that team, too, bringing everything I'd learned from working on indoor grills, air grilling, and air frying.

How does seeing the products you helped create in the store or someone’s home feel?
Whenever I go to a store, I swing through the Ninja aisle. I’ve got a dozen products under my belt at this point, and seeing them on the shelf is incredibly rewarding. Anytime I release a new product I’ve worked hard on, I obsessively check the reviews online for the next three months. It’s exciting to see these products' impact on people’s lives.

Seeing my products in-store and getting customer feedback is one of the reasons I joined the SharkNinja team. Before working for Ninja, I helped design scanners and sensing equipment for space shuttles, submarines, aircraft, and pipelines. While clambering around on shuttles and aircraft was cool, none of my work was visible. I would make a bolt hole scanner for the Air Force and teach them how to use it. Then I would go home, and I'd never see it again. There wasn’t much feedback or personal payoff in that.

Recently, your outdoor products have been heating up. Tell us about that.
About two years ago, we realized that the outdoor space needed more power. Instead of relying on electricity to power our grills, smokers, and ovens, we wanted to explore propane as a power source. With propane, we could raise cooking temperatures and unlock new capabilities. Since we’d never done it before, it required a deep dive — reaching out to subject matter experts, studying competitor products, and learning the core principles of propane operation. We tackled the challenge with a lot of passion.

It took about two years to develop, roughly twice as long as most of our products, because we didn’t want to enter the market with a copycat. We wanted to create something truly unique — and we did with the Ninja FlexFlame. It offers five ways to cook, combining precise temperature control, woodfire flavor, and high-powered cyclonic air. You can grill, smoke, roast, griddle, and make pizza. We focused on features that truly matter to outdoor cooks and worked hard to ease the hesitation many people have about cooking with propane.

You were featured in a commercial for FlexFlame. Tell us about that experience.
Being in the commercial wasn’t something that I was too worried about. I had the advantage of knowing the product inside and out. I know every little piece in the grill and why it's there, so I didn’t require much prep time before the camera started rolling. It was a new experience having a makeup crew and being under all the lights. 

What has been your favorite product that you have worked on?
Learning how propane products work while developing the FlexFlame was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. It was entirely new for me. We’re proud to offer a product with temperature control, a fan, and the ability to smoke. It was stressful at times, but ultimately a very rewarding journey. 

Working on our first outdoor grill was exciting, too. Understanding how to design for an outdoor space, account for environmental impact on the product, and generate flavorful, high-quality, consistent smoke was something new for us. That project was also when I began leading a team of engineers, which was an exciting step career-wise that made the project stand out in my mind.

What is your favorite thing to cook with a Ninja product?
Everyone in my family loves smash burgers, so we cook a lot of them on the FlexFlame. I also use it for pancakes in the morning. It cooks a phenomenal pizza, and we make pizza on it a decent amount. I love cooking on it because it's fast and so versatile. 

What do you do when you are not working?
I do a lot of woodworking. I’ve built furniture in my house, including a hutch with glass doors, tables, and Adirondack chairs. I built a tree fort for my kids and always fix things around the house. I love to make stuff with random materials lying around — I am a true engineer. I even turned the crate that my grill came in into a side table for my living room.

I like to play disc golf and play a lot with my children. Before my kids were born — and before the pandemic — I played a lot of squash, and my wife and I went camping. I plan to get back into those hobbies now that our children are aging into them.

If you were to give an alumni Chapel Talk, what would you say?
Don’t let the daunting unknown of how stop you from taking the first step toward a goal. Not having a clear vision of the full path to your goal or solution can make it very hard to start moving. It's easy to rationalize staying put and spending more time pondering the problem and its possible approaches. This pause ignores two key truths. 

First, experience is often the best teacher. Making a best guess, learning from it, adjusting, and iterating is usually much faster and more effective than going down the inexorable list of "what if.” Getting it right on the first try is, in most cases, an unachievable goal, and the effort expended to execute it far outweighs the slim chances of success. 

Second, it's well understood that momentum is a very real phenomenon in both the mental and physical realms. I imagine nearly everyone has spent time staring at a blank page when trying to write an essay, only to find it flowing easily from their fingers after the first few sentences. 
Tackling large problems is subject to the same psychological effect. The simple action of taking the first step often makes the second step easier. 

With these two key advantages in mind, it becomes easier to proceed confidently, even in the face of large unknowns. Trust in your ability to be agile and learn from your experiences.
 

 

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