
Sous Vide startup Anova gets acquired by Electrolux - prostoalex
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/06/anova-electrolux/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
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tptacek
Ultimately this is the outcome for all new cooking appliances. Breville bought
PolyScience (the godfather of all sous vide devices) a few years back.
Temperature-controlled cooking may never be as widespread as the microwave
oven, but it has a decent shot at being as popular as the food processor or
the large-form-factor toaster oven.

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dharma1
I've always wondered, why don't regular $30-50 rice/slow cookers have better
temp controls.. cost would be minimal

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mattmaroon
I looked into building such a unit. The problem problem with that style
machine (like the sous vide supreme) is the heating element. It's a flexible
mat. Getting it at a sufficiently high watt density, to keep it from taking
forever to preheat and totally sucking wind when you add a big hunk of cold
meat, is expensive. In that industry your build cost generally needs to be
about 25% of retail, so an extra $20 for your heating mat means $80 more at
the store.

It's also less accurate temperature control because the thermocouple isn't
submersed. It's a strip on the outside of a metal pan.

Rice cookers and crock pots don't have to heat up nearly as much water (which
has a high specific heat capacity) as a sous vide machine big enough to handle
a slab of ribs.

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jwildeboer
The Kenwood cooking chef is IMHO the (expensive) example on how to get this
right. Inductive heating, very precise and even heat distribution. And goes up
to 140°C. Thermomix stops at 120°C. But for me it is too pricey.

I am thinking of hacking the Kenwood kcook and add better temerature control
to it, though :-) With an ESP8266 - boom. DIY connected kitchen device!

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tptacek
I don't understand these devices. If I already have a circulator (and an oven
and a range), why would I want one of these?

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azernik
Nitpick - Anova isn't exactly a startup. The original Anova Scientific
[[https://www.waterbaths.com](https://www.waterbaths.com)] is a lab equipment
manufacturer specializing in controlled-temperature water baths. When they
realised that chefs were willing to spend thousands or tens of thousands of
dollars on their baths for cooking purposes, they made a classic pivot and
span off Anova Culinary to make smaller, cheaper products for home kitchen
use. The Kickstarter was as far as I understand as much to gauge market size
as to raise capital.

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cleetus
For the space constrained, the Joule is a good bit smaller.

[https://anovaculinary.com/anova-precision-
cooker/specificati...](https://anovaculinary.com/anova-precision-
cooker/specifications/)

[https://www.chefsteps.com/joule/specs](https://www.chefsteps.com/joule/specs)

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zwily
The nice thing about the Anova is that you don't have to use your phone to set
it.

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kelvie
Yeah, it's annoying, but the Joule fits so much better into the drawer. It
also has a much lower minimum water line, and slightly higher heat output, and
as a result, it can heat up small portions to temperature _really_ quickly.

(We had an Anova, replaced it with a Joule and gave the Anova away)

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DenisM
Better for travel, too.

I took my Anova with me to a rented condo in Hawaii, it's nice to be able to
make quality food with minimal effort. Joule would be even easier to justify.

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kin
Happy for them! The Anova product is great and they iterated on it properly.
Unlike a lot of other Kickstarters I've backed...

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SEJeff
Anova is great, but I still prefer the Chef Steps Joule given the option of
either/or.

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dogma1138
Anova has much higher power output especially on the larger (Wifi+BT) model
which both speeds up the heating by quite a bit and allows you to cook large
volumes.

Anova is also much easier to clean than the Joule, it comes apart so easily
and you just dry it out, I have one for over a year and no signs of scaling on
the heating element because of that. The joule on the other hand can't be
easily clean you can unscrew the bottom but then you need to use a brush and
the heating element isn't fully exposed.

I have them both, and tbh I use the Anova considerably more, it's built
better, it's built smarter, and the fact that I don't need to use a phone is a
huge plus.

Sure the phone is great for the first week if you never used sous vide before
(I cooked Sous Vide on an induction cooker with very coarse temp control and
use a thermometer to know when I should turn it off and on for nearly 2 years
before getting a proper setup) but once you know the temp it just becomes a
hassle.

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nirav72
>Anova has much higher power output especially on the larger (Wifi+BT) model

Joule has 1100 watts and the Anova (Wifi + BT) is 900 watts. So not sure what
you mean by Anova having more power.

[https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/shopping/joule-vs-anova-
sous...](https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/shopping/joule-vs-anova-sous-vide-
comparison/)

I agree with you on the ease of cleaning. I also have both and the Anova seems
to be a bit easier to clean.

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scentedmeat
IIRC, the Anova cooking was originally one guy at the lab devices company that
saw the Nomiku or Polyscience and said, "we can do that" and started basically
doing this as a side business.

I hope he got a bonus at least.

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jayjay71
Do you have a source for that?

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shalmanese
I don't have a source handy but the guy was present on a ton of food forums at
the time, gathering feedback and responding to inquiries. He was pretty open
that this was a one man side project at the time. I still own one of the V1
Anovas and sent him some UI feedback (including uncovering a bug where the
calibration was done backwards on an early batch of machines).

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_ph_
Good news for Anova - I am a very happy user of their device. I hope this is
going to bring sous vide finally into all kitchen stores, especially over here
in Europe its still very unknown. Sous vide has changed my meat cooking
entirely.

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caycep
Just out of curiousity, why is it named after ANOVA?

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shalmanese
Anova Scientific was a long standing scientific water bath maker that spun off
a wildly successful culinary arm
([https://www.waterbaths.com/about.html](https://www.waterbaths.com/about.html)).

~~~
caycep
Ha, that's neat! Kind of like Nalgene?

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shalmanese
Good for Anova but this acquisition doesn't make much sense to me. Unlike most
culinary methods, there's no better and worse sous vide, all sous vide
machines produce the exact identical quality outcome. There's some minor
differentiation when it comes to size, noise, apps etc. but they turn out to
be not super important in practice.

As Sous Vide becomes more popular, all of the existing players are going to
get murdered by cheap, Chinese generics and there's no real room for profit in
the market. The devices are incredibly simple and easy to manufacture and
there's no defensive moat around any of the technology.

There's the possibility of Anova branching out from SV into other related
devices but it's unclear where it could head to justify the acquisition
amount. They can either choose to pursue devices that are even more niche than
SV (combi ovens, vacuum sealers, chamber vacuums, centrifuges, rotovaps) in
the hopes that they become increasingly mainstream or they can go after more
popular devices (microwaves, dishwashers, toaster ovens, blenders etc.) which
are incredibly competitive fields filled with tough incumbents. Neither seems
like an incredibly compelling choice or one I would stake an acquisition on.

I'm glad the team has gotten this far and has been instrumental in pushing SV
more into the mainstream but I don't see many bright prospects for their
future.

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krapht
Never underestimate the power of marketing and branding in creating profit
over generic competitors. See blenders: Ninja, Vitamix.

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MrBuddyCasino
Or: Thermomix, can be yours for the low, low price of 1199 €. Widely
successful product.

Also, apparently Anova stuff is "connected in a meaningful way" \- sounds
familiar?

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shalmanese
All the current SV companies can see the writing on the wall and hope that
they can avoid commodification via their proprietary app. Except that the
problem is that Sous Vide is the ultimate open platform since each recipe only
consists of two numbers, a temperature and a time.

The apps aren't super useful in the first place and, even if they were,
there's no meaningful way for the apps to provide lockin since you can never
restrict a recipe to a single device.

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eps
Getting nothing but a blank page on iOS.

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eps
Whoops, wrong topic.

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the-dude
You can delete

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eps
Yeah, I know, but it's only in the first hour or two.

