Instant Pot has become a cultural icon, everyone has one. How does such an iconic brand go under so quickly? Just bad management? I'm not buying the excuses of "its the macroeconomic climate blah blah"
That's the crazy part of the "free money" short term loans of the past couple of years. Did these companies not think that they'd need to be refinanced?
More likely the execs know they can take their piece and then bounce when the check comes due. There's no downside, they can just move on to the next victim and repeat until they have enough money to retire.
When the interest rates bump up, that's not a per company thing. Where's the "next victim and repeat" opportunity going to be when there's no 0% available?
> The company's meteoric growth trajectory has slowed down in recent years. According to S&P, sales declined by almost 22 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, the seventh consecutive quarterly contraction.
We got one for the house ~4 years ago. It's still working fine, and we don't need to upgrade to one with Bluetooth connectivity or anything like that.
I'm guessing they found the size of their market wasn't infinite.
But then why wouldn't the same process result in the bankruptcy of all (relatively) durable goods manufacturers with a limited set of products? For example, why hasn't Vitamix (blenders) or Zwilling (knives) gone into bankruptcy?
Also, I don't think the market for this stuff is ever truly saturated: every day, plenty of people get their first apartment and need to buy appliances. Instant Pot seems similar to other things like microwaves and toasters, which we don't think of as a dead end due to market saturation.
I think the "bought by private equity and wrung dry" explanation makes more sense. Or if not that, perhaps just a poorly run business.
People use knives a lot more than instant pots. They wear down quite quickly and many just buy new ones instead of sharpening. Vitamix blenders are priced quite high to make up for a lower sales volume.
> Also, I don't think the market for this stuff is ever truly saturated: every day, plenty of people get their first apartment and need to buy appliances. Instant Pot seems similar to other things like microwaves and toasters, which we don't think of as a dead end due to market saturation.
The market for microwaves isn't, because people use them. Outside of that craze, I don't know of anyone who uses their instant pot anymore. It was a fad, PE came in and gutted it. but the fact is, it probably wasn't going to be this huge performer either way.
Isn't that fine though? I mean, if you've created a popular product, and make margin on every sale, why would only making 100 million dollars instead of 400 million dollars in profit push you into bankruptcy?
Did they take out a ton of loans to expand their manufacturing capabilities with out of touch sales projections or something?
I would compare that to the bedroom industry. How often do you buy a bedframe or a new dresser? Those businesses are not going out of business, yet the turnover per-household is equally slow.
> Somehow I doubt the current incarnation of these companies has much at all to do with their origin.
The origin of Pyrex is Corning, the Gorilla Glass maker. They divested Pyrex because they've got tired of dealing with the consumer market and wanted to focus on B2B sales.
The US market was acquired by (as shown) eager to make a quick buck on brand recognition. The European market was acquired by a different company which still manufactures borosilicate cookware to this day (and are not affected by this bankruptcy).
Aye, and this drives me nuts. For 50+ years, "Pyrex" was the name of a material, borosilicate glass, with known material properties. You could count on it being safe in certain situations.
Then Corning somehow decided that it was the name of a _brand_, and they could use whatever inferior material they wanted, and if you put it in those same situations it would explode and cover your kitchen/lab in glass shards.
Pyrex, the term, was originally a brand for borosilicate glass. It has become partially generic over the years, like Aspirin or Kleenex.
Aspirin is still a trademark of Bayer in Canada; if they want to switch to ibuprofen instead of aspirin as the active ingredient, and sell it as Aspirin, they could. Similarly, if Kimberley-Clark decides to start selling sandpaper and call them Kleenex, they could.
If a trademark becomes fully generic it can be ruled so by a court, at which point the trademark protection is lost. Aspirin is like that in the US. But that is pretty rare these days.
But if someone sold ibuprofen as "aspirin", doctors would rightfully decry the move as likely to get someone killed. It's a generic but it has a specific meaning.
Selling soda-lime glass as "pyrex" has gotten plenty of people injured, but evidently none severely enough to sue Corning's pants off.
Aspirin is different - the US trademark for the name was explicitly expropriated from Bayer by the US government during WW1 and became a generic... that didn't happen to Kleenex or Pyrex.
It's now also (confusingly) known as PYREX, and here's their website: https://www.pyrex.eu/. I'm not sure if they can deliver to the US (because trademarks and stuff).
Corelle still uses the same really excellent formula they've always used, though. I have a mixed set of new and old Corelle dishes (<1 yr old and >10 years old), and I can't tell the new ones from the old ones.
This is certainly not my understanding. After production left USA quality is worse. Breaks more often and when it shatters, it doesn’t just break apart. It’s like a kinetic blast sending forth hair and bigger sized razor sharp glass shards in a surprisingly wide radius. It’s like a mutually assured destruction event and will require heavy clean up and you still might end up with glass in your feet and eyes.
I remember reading the Amazon reviews and the amount of 1 star stories about how a plate landed them in the ER was concerning.
I bought some vintage Corelle at a private sale and it seems different to me at least but maybe I am buying the wrong contemporary stuff.
I wonder if some of the bad Amazon experiences are due to counterfeit/fakes, and/or the product lines that are made in china? Their products vary in materials and country of manufacture. The ones I like are made of Vitrelle, come directly from Corelle, and it's one of the product lines they still make in New York: https://www.corelle.com/product/winter-frost-white-78-piece-...
I think they're all (even the vintage ones) subject to risk of shattering into pointy shards if they break, though. They're not magic. :)
Corelle plates have always been that way, I think. I was raised using them, and I still buy them now that I have children of my own.
For me, they're 100% shatterproof until they're not. You can drop them over and over again, and never notice any visible change. But then when they finally do shatter, it's almost like an explosion.
I think this is because they're built from a pressurized metal/glass layered composite. Very sturdy until enough internal damage builds up.
More or less matches my experience, including having been raised eating on Corelle dishes. They'll take drop after drop and then suddenly the last one leaves a giant mess to sweep up. Every time.
I have discovered that if you leave a Corelle plate outside during the winter, in the spring it will be broken into little bitty pieces. It can't handle the freeze and thaw cycles which surprised me.
A little bit of on purpose, a little bit of not caring. I had it underneath a small plant pot and just left it out there. I found it interesting that it can handle hot thermal stress (expansion) but not cold (contraction).
I have been satisfied with Anchor-Hocking. They have a different kind of glass than borosilicate but it is still specially made for resisting heat. https://www.anchorhocking.com/why-choose-glass/
Strongly recommend AH. I've got a lot of their products in varying sizes. Integrated measuring feature makes them easily the most practical pieces of glassware in my kitchen.
I use borosilicate lab beakers in the kitchen. The main disadvantage is that they don't have handles so you'll need a pot holder to use them for hot things.
Okay, so i might have intentionally left out the eye protection as well, but it's perfectly natural to have a triple beam in place of the instant pot, yeah?
Oxo is one of the finest examples of mass-market consumer industrial design and quality I've ever seen. Every product of theirs I've purchased has been exemplary, even years later after heavy and extensive use.
Here is a really good Wirecutter article that discusses the differences. TL;DR: they don't consider the switch away from borosilicate to be a big deal, but borosilicate-based products are still out there if you want them.
I've been skeptical of the Wirecutter for a few years now. It seems their reviews are starting to lean away from quality products, and start pointing towards companies with a bigger marketing budget. Example, their handvac recommendations are entirely Black & Decker, but I've tried a few of them and found them vastly overpriced compared to others on the market.
They do not handle the rapid temperature differentials a home chef often encounters when they aren't careful enough. Especially when they are expecting the resilience of borosilicate glass.
Up until a few he Pyrex brand consumer food storage containers seemed to be this other glass (soda lime?, with the bluegreen if you looking into the edge).
Then, a few years ago, they seemed to switch essentially the same SKUs to a third glass (whitish looking into the edge) in slightly different glass forms, and slightly different lid fit). (I don't think they were counterfeit.)
"...everyone has one." Going to be difficult to sell more then. :^)
Also, they don't fully replace more traditional cooking apparatus, like a pressure cooker, a crock pot, or rice cooker. We have all 4, and what the Instant Pot got a lot of use initially we found that the for purpose cooking pots worked better and got better results. So the Instant Pot slowly fell out of favor.
Our Instant Pot makes great rice - I barely use my Zoji anymore. The IP clearly beats it for brown rice both in speed and flavor as the Zoji's seem to be optimized for white. My Instant Pot also has a slow cooker function as well that works just fine.
About the only place the Instant Pot falls down a bit as a pressure cooker is when you need the full 15psi, like the Modernist Cuisine recipe that pressure-cooks squash with a bit of baking soda to kick in the Maillard reaction. The recipe works great in a stovetop pressure cooker that hits 15psi but fails in an Instant pot that only hits around 12.5psi or so - you can always taste the baking soda when it is done cooking. The pressure difference might also impact making stock but I haven't tried a side by side (though the Instant Pot is non-venting so I'd expect it's stock to at least have superiour clarity).
If I could only pick one out of the four, it would be the IP. No question.
Probably depends which rice cooker you have. My Zojirushi (highest-end non-pressure model when I got it a few years ago) clearly outclasses my IP for any kind of rice, though is much slower.
I used to have a Cuckoo pressure rice cooker that made the best rice, fast, but it eventually started leaking even after replacing the seals, and professional repair would have been prohibitively expensive in Canada
For the pressure cooked squash with baking soda? Tried that and it didn't work. There is some magic that happens at the higher temperatures associated with the higher pressure.
What do crockpots and pressure cookers offer that the instant pot doesn't? I have a breville instant pot-equivalent and can't see ever needing a crockpot. And I understood it to be fundamentally just a pressure cooker with some programmability
I have both but we use the instantpot (EU name) more often because it fits more jar when canning, but mostly because of the electronics controls that makes it reach the optimal temp for pressure without making any noise from excess steam releasing. You can achieve it with an analog pressure cooker by it’s harder and you can’t get it completely silent like the instapot without running the risk of being under pressurized (and under temp), which affects cooking and sterilization effectiveness.
Not that this means your response is wrong (I largely agree) but funny enough in my household our insta-pot is essentially just a rice cooker. We basically use it for nothing else, but it’s also really good for rice! Fluffy and perfect everytime.
The instant pot in the most basic pot serves as all of
(1) An electric pot that can be used like a regular stovetop pot,
(2) A pressure cooker, and
(3) A slow cooker (and a few other things that are typically specialized single-use devices but are really slight variations on those 3 things)
More advanced models are also:
(4) immersion circulator (“sous vide" cooker), and
(5) air fryer.
In many of these roles it is often seen as sonewhat less good than a dedicated device, though even people who feel that way may see it as useful as a multitasker and because it can more conveniently do dishes that require more than one function without changing pots.
I need to look into this, I didn't know it could be a slow cooker; that would save me two devices if I get rid of the slow cooker and the rice cooker (though it is really nice to make teriyaki chicken in the instant pot and rice in the rice cooker).
Because everyone has one...you have explained it yourself.
Every consumer brand that expands quickly will keep expanding to the point that they saturate their market (GoPro, Doc Martens was a recent IPO in the UK that has self-destructed, it happens over and over). What is unusual about this case is that, afaik, they didn't IPO. Usually the IPO is the prelude to saturation and then bankruptcy because the incentives get totally skewed (and because companies will usually fiddle with supply before the IPO to boost the sale price).
Declining quality might also be an issue. Doc Martens no longer have the quality or guarantee that they used to. Similarly, other posts have mentioned that Pyrex has apparently changed their formula to a lower quality substitute.
If Doc Martens went public in the 70's, they'd probably be in a lot better shape today. They aren't nearly as popular now as they were in the 70's thru 90's. They picked a weird time to go public.
They didn't. They were acquired by private equity a few years before their IPO. The company had some issues with production/distribution, PE owner fixed these, pumped up supply, created a lot of buzz, sales skyrocketed (they are massively more popular than the 90s, they weren't a particularly big brand then...you have heard of them now), IPO'ed the company and then sales collapsed because everyone has one and they could push the sales dial only so far. They massively increased penetration with young people, the brand was really very limited before PE came in (and tbf, PE have ruined it because everyone has them now).
Btw, the bonus pool for the PE owners for the DOC IPO was sizeable. Iirc, it was £400m, there were junior bankers taking home multiple millions on one transaction (Permira has an eat what you kill approach, so the bonus pool was shared with junior staff...it was so large that I don't think senior staff could have taken all of it anyway). You had people in their mid-20s making 10x the value of their parent's house in a few years, it is one of the best PE deals of the last few decades (the bonus pool was actually larger than the purchase price).
Consumers significantly under-estimate how easy it is to get them to buy shit. There are PE funds who specialise in just these kind of deals: buy old brand, pump it up with hot air, IPO to clueless retail investors or sell to a bigger company...it works.
> (they are massively more popular than the 90s, they weren't a particularly big brand then...you have heard of them now)
I don't know where you get that from. In the 90's they were so popular you could go into literally any shoe store and buy them used because everyone wanted a pair, and shoe stores knew it. You weren't a real rebel if you weren't wearing a pair of Docs. In the 90's, rebels were a dime a dozen. Docs were everywhere.
