Kitchen gadgets have become big business with both restaurant chefs and amateur cooks across the globe, it has been reported. According to the Columbia news service, huge numbers of inventions aimed at making life easier for those in the kitchen have flooded the market from citrus zesters to avocado slicers and salad spinners.The news provider reports that a recent survey from Home World Business, revealed that in the US alone the kitchen gadget industry is worth almost 1 billion a year.Lisa McManus, senior editor of Cooks Illustrated magazine in Boston, told the Colombian news service With the growth of interest in cooking and food over the past few decades has come a similar growth in kitchen gadgets to appeal to home cooks.Matthew Bird, who has worked in design for 15 years, added that another reason behind the growing kitchen gadget market is the range of new materials now available to manufacturers.For example, companies like OXO International use computer renderings and stereolithography - a production technology that used lasers to create 3-D polyurethrane models - to create kitchen gadgets like the one-handed salad spinner, he said.