Does your child refuse to eat hot food? In Japan they have a word for that.
I spent years thinking my son Max was just being difficult.
Not picky difficult. Not "won't eat vegetables" difficult. I mean refusing to touch anything that was even remotely warm. Pasta, soup, rice, porridge. If it came off the stove, Max wanted nothing to do with it. We'd sit there watching his food go cold while everyone else finished eating. I tried blowing on it. I tried spreading it on a cold plate. I tried patience. I tried the complete absence of patience. Nothing worked.
So I went looking for a solution. And found absolutely nothing useful.
Hot plate covers with built in fans. Bulky, needing batteries. A Kickstarter for something called the Koolspoon, an American invention that was essentially a frozen spoon. A frozen spoon. Who wants to eat with a frozen spoon?
Everything either involved waiting, diluting, blowing, or, my personal nemesis, charging. As a mum of three I have one rule about gadgets: if it needs charging, it will be dead when you need it most. You know the drill. Your phone, your kids' headphones, the Nintendo Switch, and the other fourteen things fighting for the one functioning charger in your house. Add a food cooling device to that list and I promise you, at 7pm on a Tuesday with three hungry children staring at you, it will have exactly zero percent battery.
So I built something that doesn't need any of that. No water, no ice, no blowing, no charging. Just a magic wand with a freezable star-shaped tip that lives in the freezer, clips on, and cools food down in seconds. I called it CoolaWand.
Then things got interesting.
Once I had launched CoolaWand, I was browsing Kickstarter and stumbled across a Japanese invention called the Nekojita Fufu. A tiny cat figurine with a built in fan that sits on the rim of your cup and blows on your tea to cool it down. It got covered by CNET and TechRadar. It raised 817% of its funding goal in two weeks. The internet, it turns out, has a lot of cat tongues.
Cat tongues. That sent me down a rabbit hole.
What is Nekojita?
In Japanese, neko means cat and shita means tongue. Nekojita means cat tongue. It's the word Japanese people use to describe anyone who is hypersensitive to heat in their mouth. The people who genuinely cannot eat or drink anything hot without real discomfort, sometimes even pain.
It's not fussiness. It's not a phase. It's a real sensitivity, so recognised that an entire language gave it a name.
And suddenly everything made sense. Max wasn't being dramatic. He was Nekojita. I'm also a little bit Nekojita if I'm honest. My husband on the other hand is the complete opposite. Nothing is ever hot enough for him. I'm pretty sure he'd eat molten lava if you put it in front of him. There's probably a Japanese word for that too but I haven't found it yet.
Here were Japanese engineers on the other side of the world building a product for the exact same human quirk. We'd both spotted the same thing. Just from very different angles — they were solving it for adults with their morning tea, I was solving it for children at mealtime. And I had the distinct advantage of not needing a charger.
"We no longer endure a meal that's too hot. We act."
Those words came from Marie Cao, known as @littlebunbao on Instagram, a French parenting influencer and mum of two neuroatypical children. She ordered her CoolaWand in February and sent me a message I won't forget in a hurry.
Her daughters have ADHD. For them, a meal that's too hot doesn't just mean impatience. It cuts appetite, raises tension, and turns something simple into a battle.
"The wand lives in the freezer, and when something's too hot the girls just get up, clip on the star, and stir. No complaining, no stress, no tension, with a smile because it's fun. Even me at 40, I smile every time I use it."
That's exactly what CoolaWand is. Not a gadget. A small thing that makes a hard moment a little lighter, quietly, simply, with a frozen star.
So, is your child Nekojita?
If they blow on every spoonful, wait for everything to go cold, or just flatly refuse to eat until the plate is lukewarm, maybe they are. And maybe it's simpler to solve than you think.
Juliette, founder of CoolaWand, mum of Mélodie, Max and Gaspard 🪄
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