I have an Instant Pot, and love it a lot. But, here is some perhaps relevant anecdata:
1. The original stainless steel removable liner is embossed with nice, legible capacity levels. Unfortunately, they're way off: the "9 cup" line is actually about 12 cups. (Not a big deal; we just don't use the markings.)
2. I bought the Instant Pot Air Fryer Lid lid add-on, which was supposed to support temperatures of up to 400°F. But, after a lot of testing, I found that it was seriously limited as to the heat it would supply. Basically, the internal temperature never got over 360°F, and in fact after eight minutes of running the heater would turn off and the unit would cool down to 270°F and then maintain that temperature. All the while, the external temperature would happily show 400°F.
My guess: they discovered late in the development cycle that the air fryer lid would overheat and kill older Instant Pots. They couldn't fix this after the fact, so they modified the lid firmware to limit the actual temperatures, but keep displaying the desired temperature, hoping users wouldn't notice. (I complained, and they promptly send me a new lid. But, it had the same flaw.)
I'm not even American (i.e. I don't ordinarily use anything else called a 'cup' (unless playing cricket)) but that seems unreasonably dumb. Of course that will cause confusion? That's surely fraudulent in it's deception or reckless unawareness of its deception?
'Cup' is a crazy unit for a number of reasons, one of them is that there's an Imperial cup, a US cup (customary), and a US cup (legal), and a metric cup, and that they're all different. But an entirely new one on me is that there's an 'Instant Pot cup' that's only roughly ⅔ the size of any of them! By comparison the other difffernces are intellectually annoying but completely inconsequential!
...which is either a lot of confusion, 1000kg of confusion, 2000lb of confusion, 2240lb of confusion, 2400lb of confusion, 1 giga calorie of confusion, 7 giga calories of confusion, 10 giga calories of confusion, 12,000 btu/h of confusion, or 100, 10000, or 100000 unitless amounts of confusion.
That seems like an UK-specific idea, and only works in writing. I doubt you'd find too many international English speakers make any distinction whatsoever between ton and tonne.
Well, I'm in Australia, and it's common here (too).
I suspect you'd find it's common in most English-speaking non-USA metric-embracing nation states.
It works fine spoken, too, because we could say 'imperial ton' or 'american ton' if we ever needed to refer to a specific, archaic, mostly abandoned unit of weight - which is, rounded down, effectively never.
FWIW we're taught to pronounce the word somewhere between 'ton' and 'tone', but, really, the context here is that all tonnes (or phonetic equivalent) are metric once you're outside the USA.
Re-purposing words - even 'only works in writing' (like we're using to communicate here) words - seems whatever the opposite of 'luxuriating in the massive potential breadth of language' might be called.
Specifically 'metric ton' I expect would be mildly offensive to everyone that uses metric, and doesn't want to disambiguate the pre-existing, and clearly more widely prevailing homophone of 'tonne'.
I’m Australian and work in steel fabrication / construction, so constantly dealing with 1000’s of kilograms to mean tonne, and pronounced tun, but also don’t blink if someone wants to pronounce it correctly as per https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... (more like ton).
Yes, that was pretty much the crux of my point. If you did use that spelling, you wouldn't have to disambiguate, and it'd align with popular English-speaking nations that already use metric.
It's a bit like not using the word 'metre' - despite the USA recalcitrantly eschewing the actual measurement - and confusingly re-purposing 'meter' (a device for measuring something).
I mean, sure, they sound the same (refer sibling comment and response) but context can inform in spoken English.
In written English it's dreadfully convenient to have unique strings for unique concepts (or words).
Frankly, the -er is better based on actual English pronunciation rules. The -re ending comes from French and is less compatible with how most of the rest of English is pronounced.
And I can't say I've ever been confused by these two different meanings of the word. Can you even come up with an example sentence illustrating ambiguity here?
Ooh, that first bit suggests you're in danger of suggesting there's a coherent, sensible, set of rules for English ... which I'm sure you don't really subscribe to. Anyone adopting that position as a starting point is going to have a bad day, of course. : )
So, is 'er' better in terms of pronunciation? Perhaps, though I don't think that matters much, as pronunciation varies so wildly based on country, region, education, etc, plus there's so much inconsistency with spelling -> pronunciation within English that I think it's fair to say that ship has long since sailed.
In terms of writing however there's a huge advantage to having words with different meanings have different spellings. I assume I don't have to pitch that idea terribly hard?
For us non-Americans I suspect the frustration boils down to having a recalcitrant nation stubbornly refusing to join the rest of the metric world while simultaneously poisoning the language well of metric unit names everyone else is already using.
I think you only got down voted here because some fraction of people who identify as US citizens reflexively disagree with anything slightly indicating there are other correct definitions other than their own.
I'm not suggesting English is a perfect representation of thoughts & concepts into strings of letters & punctuation, or that any one variant has tweaked it to be just right.
I'm complaining that the Rest Of The World has to contend with the dilution of metric terminology (by the regrettable rise of f.e. 'metric ton') that's being perpetrated by a nation state that doesn't even use metric.
Though I think American English tends to pronounce 'ton' as 'tun', would that be right, or are there significant regional accent variations?
Anyway, refer sibling comments on common usage and cultural defaults - and I'll re-emphasize that it works really well for written communication. Like this.
G'day - just to add for British English, here it's pronounced 'ton' (same as a ton) rhyming with 'stun' or TUN if you will.
It's extremely rare (don't think I've ever heard it) - except maybe in some industries still, I don't know - but there's an interesting history of advocacy/use of saying 'ton-E' or 'tunnie', to disambiguate the same way AmE pronounces it 'metric ton'.
I don't think it was ever common parlance, just important to disambiguate in some industries. Similarly I think 'thou' (-sandth of an inch) is preferred over 'mil' since that's such a common abbreviation of 'millimetre' (which =39thou, so you want to get that right).
There was an article posted here a few months back on the subject of 'thousands of an inch', the misuse of 'mill', etc - and a slight digression around how our friends on the far side of the pond are fascinated by fractions.
That says 180ml, so similar but different again? Still dumb either way. Don't call it 'cup', if you must use cups just use ⅔cup?
It's like if I invent an 'air fryer' as though that's something new, and then talk about an '18" oven tray' which is actually 6" wide, but in my air fryer line that's the measurement of what we call '18" oven tray'. Who's winning what? How is this good for anyone?
What's a 'coffee maker'? My espresso machine's portafilter basket takes as much coffee as I put in it. So does a cafetière. A Nespresso/other pod based machine is a fixed amount which as far as I'm aware is always specified in ml if at all.
Ok, the first picture there is of a Turkish stove-top style device which (and the vague description of any coffee-making device too) as I said takes as much as you put in, where do cups come in to it?
If you use cups to measure coffee, fine (I don't measure, but I think grams would be more normal) - or if your specific 'coffee maker' came with a cup, fine, but don't over-generalise?
I mean not even over-generalise - GP told me my 'coffee maker' came with a non-standard cup; I promise you it came with no cups whatsoever. (It's a Rancilio Silvia, the stock basket has a max capacity of probably 18? 21? grams - definitely less than any 'cup', about a tablespoon. But that's a physical maximum and nobody called it a cup or suggested it was for measurement.)
Maybe it's different on mobile but I see a moka pot as the first image. I have a 6-cup model, which has a 12 oz. capacity.
The point is that no one really uses those as measurements, they're not useful. But almost every coffee maker comes labeled with cups anyway for some reason, probably marketing for comparison shoppers. Obviously you're right that espresso machines don't have cup markings (however that would even work), but I have to say this is the first time I've seen someone call an espresso machine a coffee maker (hence my uh... curt previous response, sorry about that).
I see the same, I just forgot the word and also confused it with the Turkish cevze. As in, had always confused them, I didn't realise moka pots were Italian. Anyway - I'm pretty confident you won't find Italians in Italy talking about the cup size of their moka pot or using cups to measure coffee grounds/water into it.
I've never heard an espresso machine called a coffee maker either, but I've never heard the latter term at all, hence this whole thread. Sounds like a refusal to call someone (i.e. a person, not machine) a 'barista' to me.
Mr Coffee carafe markings is 5oz per cup. This is not an espresso machine that makes "small" cups. This is a good old fashioned American pot of coffee and I can tell you what they call a FIVE cup coffee maker makes an actual 2 cups of coffee.
Interesting. In Chinese 合 (hé) can mean whole, but also pronounced gê (I don't have e with 3rd tone character) it can mean a measure of grain or 100ml.
The standard Indian measurement of rice is done by the mutthi (handful) and nazar (eyeballed). That's what I've seen moms and aunts and even career cooks do. This is also the crowd that rarely agrees with cooking their rice in a rice cooker. Not surprising, since they rarely agree with each other on how best to cook which rice.
I still enjoy the reactions (of surprise, disappointment, and sometimes mild derision) when I tell people I prefer to cook my rice in a microwave.
Nevertheless, the idea of a standard fixed-volume measure of rice, by the volume it occupies after cooking, seems a poor concept to me, because the factor by which rice grows when cooked varies by breed/variety, level of processing, even soak time. That's why, I was told, the mutthi and nazar system is better.
Interesting. I wish they had just labelled it as a "gō" then, alongside the mL equivalent, and told us about why/the history in a blurb on the box/manual and then it'd have own neat little cultural thing going on.
Having grown up in Canada and now living in the US for several years, I'm just now learning about the "metric cup." I've just been assuming all this time that the cups here are 250 mL!
Sure, and that's true of feet and others too (all sorts of different regional feet) - but we standardised and that changed long ago, and nobody uses them like that any more (you'll get some non-cup measurement alongside them that breaks the ratio usage).
Cups persist, but without much standardisation - you generally have to measure if you care to know which 'cup' size you bought. It won't often matter that much, but as I said it's intellectually annoying isn't it?
Being British I don't encounter them much, just American recipes, but I generally just mentally convert as ¼l (i.e. as though a metric cup, if anyone used that) if I'm following one.
This is not true. There is the US cup, which is 1/16th of a gallon, and then there's the general notion of a "cup" which is the crap that comes with a rice cooker or whatever.
You are dead wrong. The problem most definitely isn't solved.
We live in the age of the World Wide Web and information in ambiguous units is shared everywhere simultaneously all the time.
For example gallon are still used informally in other countries than the US.
People, particularly older people, still talk about "miles per gallon" in the UK. That's Imperial gallons not US gallons. They base their feel for that volume on that.
Same with US vs Imperial pints.
Now product information on UK Amazon isn't always rewritten specifically for the UK. Often they just reuse the blurb from US Amazon without correcting the spelling or grammar to save money.
I own an old Jetboil stove I bought well before Brexit. The inside is marked in "cups".
Any guesses if those are Imperial cups, US cups or Metric cups. I mean I bought it in the UK so they should be Metric cups but Jetboil is a US company so...who knows.
This might not be a problem for you personally but it's definitely still a problem.
Read it as 'too much standardisation' of you prefer - see the rest of the sentence after you quoted. Which US cup is 1/16 (a presumably US) gallon anyway, 'customary' or 'legal'?
This is rarely said, but often the key to undoing many arguments against the (what are now "US") units.
They come from a time where the common measurement tool was a balance scale for weight or two vessels of the same volume and any base unit was seemingly arbitrary. There was no understanding of universal constants yet. They're still useful when you have no reference other than the quantity indicated on the label of a package and the ability to measure equal parts.
I don't know how much rice you eat, but my experience has been that 1 rice cup cooks enough rice for a modest serving for 2 adults - in our household at least.
The general idea is that a cup of rice is the main portion of the meal, and the rest of the meal is add ons (mostly veggies with a bit of meat). If the rice is just a side to the entree, then yeah, you're going to be eating less of it.
That's the idea but as someone who have been in Asia all my life rarely do people eat the entire cup per meal. 0.5-0.7 cup per person is more common this days for standard meal.
No, that's backwards. It takes about 12 cups of water to fill the inner pot to the "9 cup" line. In other words, 1 cup as measured by the lines is actually 1 1/3 cups (or about 315ml). So, measuring with the lines gives you more than you want, not less (as you would with a rice measuring "cup").
And, the manual doesn't mention anything about the scale (although it does mention the "MAX" line at the top of the pot).
Here's another guess - my rice cooker has line for cups that are for filling with water after you add rice. So, in your case, you put in 9 cups of rice, then add water until it is at the 9 cup line, then that's the right amount of water. The water fills the space between the rice and then fills up to the line.
It is the same company that sold cheaper soda-lime glass under the name "Pyrex". Pyrex as a brand used to mean "borosilicate glass", a type of glass known for its superior resistance to thermal shock.
It’s strange instant pot would burn their brand by being associated with pyrex. Just last week, I was talking to an older person, who commented that she kept somehow shattering her pyrex. I guess an older piece finally broke a few years ago, and she hadn’t heard about it.
Anyway, it continues to be a safety hazard. Shame on corning for making the change (without just killing the brand name).
My instant pot’s fine though. I dropped the lid from 10 feet on to concrete, and the heat sheild cracked, but it didn’t affect the seal or safety.
Not familiar with the Instant Pot personally (I have a Sage/Breville Fast Slow Pro pressure cooker, which is pretty great!), but I believe it has a rice cooker function?
The “cup” markings are presumably the fill lines for making rice (ie: for 6 rice-cups of rice, add water to the 6 cup mark)?
At least, that’s how it works with a regular rice cooker.
While I don't disagree, I think the main reason they failed had to do with spreading themselves too thin. Competing where they had no business competing.
When they launched, they made an Instant Pots, and it was a fairly good product, with good marketing. There were other pressure cookers before, but this was beyond easy to use -- and super Instagram and Facebook friendly to share cooking videos.
But then they expanded out to... Air Fryers, Coffee Makers, even Air Purifiers... and it's just too much. They weren't going up against old pressure cookers that hadn't really been updated in 40 years, they were going up against established modern brands like Nestle and Keurig, and whoever else.
And they never really established a reason for all the different devices to live under that brand... and probably lost quality control (as you said). And yeah, I mean... I got an Instant Pots as a housewarming gift in 2010, and I loved it. So I gave Instant Pots to a bunch of friends as housewarming gifts... and it never seemed like a hit with the people who received it. At one point someone told me, "Thanks, but I already have one..." So I figured I'd replace my old one, and holy hell the quality in like 2017 or so was not good.
Like you pointed out the measurements on the sides were not accurate. And every dish I had made in the old Instant Pot didn't cook right in the new one. (Probably because the temps were off.) I was an idiot and tossed the old Instant Pot I had before really trying the new one out... then when the new one sucked I stopped using it all together and never bought another one.
Edit... here's a pressure cooker from like 2004. It was such a pain to clean and no matter what I did it splattered steam and liquid all over when it was turned on. Instant Pot was so much easier to use than this thing was.
I’m confused reading these posts about recent Instant Pots being considered low quality. I’ve been using mine every other day for over five years with zero issues whatsoever. Maybe it works too well as I haven’t checked up on the company since.
What do you make every day that you can stand to eat for 5 years?! (=
The original was good, but the version I got later has issues. Like sone of the button controls stopped working, and the pressure seal leaked and sputtered even when it was “locked” in the close position.
me, daily, for about that amount of time: steel-cut oats.
I eat a (large) breakfast of 1/2 cup dry oats, 3/4 cup whole milk, 1/2 cup water, cooked for 10 minutes at pressure, with a bit of brown sugar and any of dried cherries, raspberries, blueberries.
The massive advantage of an instant pot is if you cook w/ milk on a stove top, it requires constant attention to not burn the milk and have the burnt milk weld itself to the pot. Whereas in my instant pot, I throw the ingredients in with my first cup of coffee and come back in 30-40 minutes for hot breakfast and coffee #2.
Also, it makes a pretty good (not great, but I have a tiny kitchen, so I have to cut somewhere) rice cooker. Recipe: wash rice, drain, add same amount of dry rice and water by volume, pressure cook for 4 minutes. Depending on the type of rice, 3 minutes may be better. After cycle finishes, let depessurize on its own for 10 minutes, then open. Mix with a fork.
Others have answered well enough, but I didn’t say I ate the same thing. Steel-cut oats, curries, chilis, soups, etc. Mine is the Ultra not the original. It may have been manufactured between 2016-2017.
ps -- I had some issues with the pressure seal; pulling the (presumably silicone?) seal out and reseating it in the lid periodically seems to make everything work better. Also, you shouldn't feel any resistance when you rotate the lid into sealed position. If you do, pull the lid back off; juggle the seal a bit; then reseat and twist to seal again.
There's a whole generation of pressure cookers after that thing with electronic controls, presets for different food items, etc, that precede the Instant Pot. I have one that I got for free somewhere that has all of those features. Which was why I wondered what the big deal was when everybody started raving about the Instant Pot.
imo, it's the standardization that a universal device offers. Perceived or actual. But it's one big variable in preparation removed.
I wish everybody on the planet had the same couple of ovens too. Then your recipe for preparing cookies or whatever will have one big variable removed.
But because we don't have that, we waste time and energy pre-heating the oven, just to be sure that we're all cooking at the same temperature. And even then, ovens will vary in how they control temperature and grrrrr.
Same for soft/hard boiling eggs: the only error-proof way is to boil your water first and stick eggs in there for X minutes and then drench them in cold water. But that's a huge waste of the heat in the heating process. If we all used the same amount of water on top of the same heating source in the same place, we could use that pre-heating process as a part of cooking.
Yeah the Vortex was quite well rated and I got one recently for half price. I'm not sure if it's enabled anything my oven can't do yet, but it is much quicker and more efficient especially for something like reheating. So I'm using it more than I thought I would.
I believe the line markings is for water when you cook rice.
You add 9 cups of rice (perhaps with the plastic cup that comes in the box), then fill it up to the 9 cup line with water. Once cooked, this will produce perfectly cooked rice.
Thank you for your service. As a consumer, you not only have rights, but also have responsibilities - if a product is not as advertised, the market needs to know about it and the producer needs to fix it.
It'll continue to operate... I'm curious what fraction of the creditors are backed by Cornell Capital (PE owner), and if they just are using this to wipe out retirement plans/other creditors/dump a bunch of debt, or if they actually messed up.
That's why my guess was going to be: "financialization" ... buy the company, profit like crazy by selling it assets and taking on debt, cut R&D budgets, cut marketing, provide fat compensation for C-suite and board... bankruptcy ~5 years later after someone else is holding the bag. The playbook is practically as American as baseball these days. Even more so when tax payers get to pay for the bail out.
tbh I should probably get with the times and start doing it myself, at some point the music will stop and there won't be any companies left to rob blind...
It seems like the plan of private equity is always to leave creditors holding the bag. So why in the first place do creditors lend to any company at reasonable rates without assurances this won't happen?
The creditors are people's 401k's. The debt that gets issued is sold off to 'fund managers' that help enrich their friends. Until there's a law passed preventing retirement plans from forcing you into only a handful of funds, it's never going to stop.
It got harder for me to find maintenance parts for my first Instant Pot starting a few years ago.
Now I guess that was a PE-driven move to push replacements instead of maintenance.
The parts they do still sell got de-emphasized on their website and they stopped selling some. See the comments here: https://www.instanthome.com/product/instant-pot/parts/anti-b... "Hello Olga. The Duo Evo Plus, steam release valves, are not sold individually at this time. If you have any concerns about yours, please contact our Customer Care team for assistance" In one of them they even provide a link to a supposed "replacement parts" section that doesn't work at all today: https://www.instanthome.com/marketing/9001/instant-replaceme...
dunno how prohibitive they are to reproduce, but usually if a product is popular enough, someone comes along and mass manufactures the replacement parts. Just like car parts.
Of course, there are sometimes things you don't want to really mess with of questionable quality.
I'm assuming any pressure cooker has a rubber blowoff plug so there's not too much risk of the normal use valve jamming or something. And an electronic pressure cooker might sense over-heat/overpressurization.
But if the steam release valve is electronically controlled too... you're now in BMW land
Wow, this was the first place my mind went when I saw they’d taken out half a billion in credit, and it’s kind of indefensible that the article didn’t mention it at all.
Yet another storied business that had perhaps become stagnant, but certainly didn’t need to be sacrificed to vampire private equity. Where does it stop?
So I wonder how much was that the PE didn't feel like they were getting a large enough coupon (2017-19 rates) and wanted a quicker bankruptcy to redeploy their efforts? A rational corp would have refinanced the debt at 2021 rates.
> In the field of finance, the term private equity (PE) refers to investment funds, usually limited partnerships, which invest in and restructure private companies.
I'm shocked by this. We have an Instant Pot and use it. All. The. Time. It is a well made product that is simple to use, has a good feature set, is useful, and relatively inexpensive (even better when it goes on sale, which is frequent). All the people I know that have one (and that is a lot of people) feel the same way. How can't you make money when you have something like this on your hands?!?!?!
How does PE survive? If these companies become instruments and now forced into bankruptcy, the PE must write off the bankruptcy (some economic advantage must exist for this path). But then the PE has to move on and find another company to possess, right? I wish we had Instant’s financials, they did seem to be selling well, so their value was based on expected sales/profit in perpetuity…bankruptcy stops that because bankruptcy has a cap, right?
I need help understanding how PE continues to exist, beyond the assumption that they got money out of the deal and will move on to another one…
Pensions should be outlawed. If employees want retirement savings they should be given money for 401k plans, not outdated and inefficient defined benefit plans.
More importantly, company-ran pension plans should be outlawed because they are a morass of perverse incentives and opportunities for quasi-legal theft. To put it simply, it is often the incentive of the people who make decisions about the pensions to mismanage them.
I suppose pensions take advantage of the time value of money; funding someone's 401k means you can't use the money to expand your business, but if you just pay them what they would have made 30 years later, you already expanded and that money is easy to come by because you're making so much now. But, it's difficult to enforce. The expansion plans could be "yacht for the CEO plans", and when retirement time comes, "oh sorry we don't have any money :(" is the likely excuse. So it doesn't seem to work anymore in practice; being optimistic about doing better than average long-term is not a viable financial strategy.
What's inefficient about pensions? Pension funds can also participate in a wider variety of investments than individual 401k holders. Employer funded 401ks (at least in Canada) are also a free payday for fund managers since they can charge a premium over "normal" funds and the investor is a captive audience since they can't move their investments elsewhere until they change jobs.
I disagree. Pension is an insurance for accidental long life. Unless pension, everyone must hoard their property enough to live until about 90-100yo. It's a big waste for society.
PE already got theirs, through the magic of a "leveraged dividend". There's really no bigger scam going these days. From the S&P rating note a couple years ago:
"U.S.-based Instant Brands Holdings Inc. (formerly known as Corelle Brands Holdings Inc.) is issuing a new $450 million first-lien term loan. The company will use the proceeds, along with $100 million in cash, to refinance its existing $200 million term loan due 2024, $100 million seller notes, and fund a $245 million dividend to shareholders."
If you subtract out the refinanced debt the new owners walked away with $100M in company cash and another $150M in borrowed money.
PE is the Ticketmaster of finance. They charge a bunch of fees, take a bunch of money, take all of the heat, and quietly funnel the money back to the founder/early investors/etc. who sold out but don't want you to know.
>and quietly funnel the money back to the founder/early investors/etc. who sold out but don't want you to know.
I don't understand this attitude. If you're in the arts I can understand why you don't want to be a "sellout", but founders/investors? Isn't the point literally to sell out?
Some founders are legitimately in it for the long haul and treat working for the company they founded as their career. I don't know how common they are, but I was lucky to work for one for about a decade.
The fact that they own and operate a lot of sites that present themselves as part of the secondary market, and sell first-release tickets there, is not widely publicised; nor is the fact that many of the bullshit fees they attach to ticket sales are actually at the artist's request and paid to them.
PE continues to exist by gaming the system: As others on this thread have speculated, driving a company into bankruptcy can shed pension obligations and enable breaking other contracts, leases, etc. Hence the paradox of everyone having these seemingly very popular products while the company is "bankrupt." Bankruptcy is not a loss for PE, yet, anyway. Which is why there is a perverse incentive to "go bankrupt" in large measure due to LBO loans, while there is plenty of brand equity and other assets to propel future sales.
PE exists because the cases you hear about are the failures. It would be like looking at the products of Google that never made money and then wondering how Google runs, you're not looking at the full picture. For every failure story like this, there are numerous other firms where PE has come up, removed a bunch of inefficiencies, driven up profits, and then moved on. It is just a more involved form of VC investing, and in that world failures are even more common.
Sure, PE is bigger than this. But isn’t the issue people are having is that this “failure” isn’t a failure (PE gains something)…it’s part of doing business as a PE firm?
"Private Equity" is a bit too broad of a term to have a single explanation (i.e. there are a few different categories of PE strategy).
In its purest form resembling instance, PE is a decomposer. It takes a business that isn't particularly healthy (due to mismanagement, sector headwinds, etc.), and efficiently disintegrates it into raw material (various forms of capital, essentially) for eventual re-allocation elsewhere. It profits and reproduces as a side-effect of playing its role in the recycle of raw material.
It's sad because a company that played a meaningful role for people and other companies is dying and being sold for parts, but it's the cycle of life – not every company is meant to endure indefinitely.
I don’t know why you’re trying to naturalize private equity behaviour. It’s not some immutable law of nature, it’s a shitty consequence of our current set of laws and economic system. Our society could be better.
I mean, yeah, death is a shitty consequence of life.
The executives and boards who sell to these kinds of private equity companies know exactly what they’re signing up for. It’s a parasitic relationship, it isn’t dignified, but it’s less wasteful in some global market sense than self-immolation (i.e. ceasing operations).
>It's sad because a company that played a meaningful role for people and other companies is dying and being sold for parts, but it's the cycle of life – not every company is meant to endure indefinitely.
It's also worth noting that Instant Pot, Pyrex, etc. will almost certainly be back.
Freedom Group's well-deserved bankruptcy (its PE-induced enshittification began in the mid-2000s with Cerberus Capital Group) and subsequent sale of Remington, Marlin, Bushmaster, etc. to other manufacturers in no way suggests their products were not financially viable, which is why the companies that acquired them are still making said products.
Interestingly, just like Pyrex, these companies all face stiff competition from products they made more than a century ago that are still as capable as the day they were made. It's a tough go when you make products that last that long and where the market is already saturated with one's own products, and means that the industry isn't actually as large as their reputation would suggest (which is partially why we never see anything truly new from it- the other part is mostly just technological stagnation over those 100 years).
As far as other firms ruined by PE (for instance, Sears)... well, they won't be back mainly because the decline was slow enough, and competitors were present enough (Amazon, in Sears' case) to make the only valuable thing about the company the cultural cachet its name held 30+ years ago.
As a sibling comment noted, you're essentially talking about the products, not the companies. They're distinct entities that are temporally correlated, but you should reason about them separately.
It's possible to have a perfectly good and marketable product, and a terribly owned or operated company.
In this case, while the company has given up the ghost, the products are still valuable. Them most likely outcome is that some other company will acquire those products/brands and continue to extract value from them on the other side of a bankruptcy.
To do anything else would be to leave money on the table, which is not what PE owners do.
Yep. There's always the assumption that just because a business sells a product or service that it is in business to sell a product or service. This is not always true.
> explain to me why this happening isn't a bad thing
because there is now a good change everyone with one of these devices is likely no longer going to get support, warranty, or updates. apps will become outdated and fall off the app store parts to repair will no longer be available etc
devices/a brand people enjoyed using is now gone because PE did what PE does and destroyed the brand for a quick buck
Private Equity. Instant Pot had great cashflow but slowing sales, so the PE owners issued $450M in new debt and then immediately paid out $250M in dividends to themselves resulting in the company carrying 8x leverage compared to the 4x it had prior to the financial engineering. Further slowing sales and all the cash being stripped from the company ends up with bankruptcy every time.
Who in their right minds lends to a PE-owned company? You know they’re going to raid the piggy bank and leave the lender holding the bag. There can’t be that many rubes with $450 million laying around. Are the investors government pension funds or something?
LBO lenders charge high rates. This means a loan that eventually settles for less than face value can still be more profitable than a low-interest loan that gets paid off on schedule.
I guess those loans are rather quickly sold on to third parties, either as bundles or stand alone. Kind of like what happened to MBS, mortgage backed securities.
It is the bankruptcy part that I don't understand the legality of. Parent company pulls a ton of money out of subsidiary, claims bankruptcy, then magically parent company isn't liable for subsidiary's debt?
PE isn't a parent company. LBO debt is debt carried by the acquired company. So there is no sleight of hand in bankruptcy. The poison is already in the acquired company's bloodstream.
Yep, all correct. The sleight of hand comes just before bankruptcy when the assets are stripped and sold to a different entity so the debtholders are screwed with worthless assets and are stuck filing longshot lawsuits to recover assets while the ghouls who raided the company invest their ill-gotten proceeds while tying the mess up in court for years.
I know basically nothing about this, but hear money peeps talking about it all the time like it is common practice. Some version of it happened to the B&M store Clarie's.
No reason to think the company or jobs are in jeopardy. Maybe they are, maybe not. The really bag-holders are the lenders who will take a haircut. Most companies emerge from bankruptcy stronger than before, having never ceased operations.
From the article:
"Broadly speaking, the CCAA is the Canadian equivalent of Chapter 11 of the U.S. bankruptcy code. Companies enter both processes when they are seeking the court's help to protect them from their creditors while they try to come up with a way to restructure the business and continue to operate."
Yep, pretty much. PE Owners get rich(er), debtholders get wrecked, employees lose their jobs, any assets (pension contributions etc) are given to the debtholders. The company will likely continue to exist and Instant Pots will still be made/sold, but with a much smaller footprint in the future.
The linked article talks to management about how unsustainable the $500 million in debt is without noting that it was half of that amount until these jokers took out loans worth $450M to gave themselves $250M.
Instant Pots are awesome, broadly useful, and last a long time. They reached market saturation, though, and the company kept trying to find a way to keep up the growth curve it had when Instant Pot was being adopted. And then, of course, the Private Equity “extract money and load the firm up with debt” maneuver of death.
> kept trying to find a way to keep up the growth curve it had when Instant Pot was being adopted
I think if you're to pick a lesson to takeaway, this is it.
There are other objectives to pursue, than "continue to grow as much or more this year as we did last year". That objective in particular is destined for eventual, guaranteed failure – and an outcome that leads to decomposition (by PE, bankruptcy, whatever).
If you live by the sword of greed, you die by the sword of greed. It's tragic but banal in the 20th/21st Century US – great brands succumb to it every day.
I recently bought their sous vide gadget and it seems pretty good. I wish it would remember its setting after erroring out, but that's very minor. It seems very accurate, within a degree.
This is an utterly textbook private equity play, the kind of thing that has been wrecking American business and jobs.
There's nothing subtle about this at all, it's looting with a pen.
They acquire the business, load it down with massive amounts of debt, do reckless short term things to boost growth (aka "eating the seed corn") and then take the money and keep it leaving someone else holding the bag.
It has nothing at all to do with how much people do or don't like cookware.
It's a bust out, a racket, just an inch away from organized crime. It happens daily in this country.
to be clear, PE isn't always purely extractive, but when it is, it can be highly destructive. sometimes a business is so mismanaged that debt (and the pressure it adds) and new management is all that is needed to right the ship.
PE itself is a bloated industry because we have too much money being extracted out of the real economy going into the pockets of the already wealthy who don't know what to do with it, so they hand it to a money manager (i.e., PE) to make more money for them, not knowing what to do with those potential future earnings either. this is the kind of economic inefficiency that concentrations of capital brings, in direct refutation of the common economic argument that the wealthy are better at investing money (i.e., more capital efficient, which in turn supposedly adds more real productivity to the economy).
small, local amounts of wealth are more capital efficient, but large, distant amounts are not.
Private equity, as a concept, just means a firm or group of people that owns something. We're posting these comments right now on a website owned by a private equity firm. Technically if I sell my lawn service to some guy with an LLC it's private equity.
Private Equity, as a distinct industry, is fully engaged in looting of the type contemplated by the principal-agent problem:
not sure what point you're making here, but my point was that there is room for little PE, but not big PE, because little PE can have the effect of making capital more efficient for the overall economy. it's the same with arbitrage--a little arbitrage is good for the economy, but large, systemic arbitrage is extractive for no overall benefit.
the principal-agent problem emerges in any business where professional managers are employed (which usually happens when a business gets too big for its britches), so it's not PE-specific.
A while back I was reading up on private equity as an 'industry' after a prior employer was bought up by PE, carved into bits, with each 'chunk' being sold off to the highest bidder.
> Macellum’s campaign resulted in the addition of 4 of 13 directors. Also, as a byproduct of the pressure applied during the campaign, the company sold non-core assets equal to approximately 75% of the market capitalization. Macellum’s price objective were met and we exited the position at the beginning of 2021. Subsequently, a fractured board and new CEO were unable to oversee and execute the turnaround plan Macellum outlined during our campaign and results deteriorated.
Stolen from whom? The shareholders got cashed out in the acquisition. The lenders financing the acquisition might or might not lose money, but they’re certainly sophisticated enough that I shed no tears for them.
If that's true, I wonder why the article doesn't make this clear. All it says is the company has a half-billion in debt, without any explanation for how that came about. It doesn't even mention that the company is owned by a PE looter.
Quotes from the article:
> In 2019, his company merged with Illinois-based Corelle Brands, the owner of Pyrex, CorningWare, SnapWare and Corelle.
> In 2021, at the height of its popularity, the company borrowed $450 million US worth of bonds, due in 2028, to expand its business.
Is Corelle the PE firm? Is "expand its business" the standard figleaf PE firms use when looting a business?
For some unknown reason this all still happens right out in the open without a major media narrative built around it. A few activists and lawmakers have tried but it's still not in the public consciousness.
But it's constant and blatant and somehow seems to still be legal.
The business press is in on it. I don't mean in the sense that they get financial kickbacks, but business reporting is a cushy job where 90% of the work is rewriting press releases and boilerplate 'analysis' of stock movements.
Everyone who wants one already has one, and it's not the kind of thing you need to upgrade every year. I'll keep using my Instant Pot for the next 10 years, but that won't help Instant Brands make money.
By that logic, the following industries would not exist: automotive, furniture, computer, kitchen appliances, other home appliances, television, bicycle...
The article itself and mikeyouse's comment explain the situation most clearly. Standard PE financial (over)-engineering was the primary cause of their problems.
Slowing sales obviously don't help, but changes in the macro-environment can typically be weathered if the companies' financials are appropriately managed.
They're supposed to have recurring maintenance fees. One might do the maintenance themselve, but a significant part of the user base will ask a shop to do it, probably the dealer where they bought it.
> furniture, kitchen appliances, other home appliances
On the higher end it survives by charging years worth of purchase. Like a 4000 bucks oak dining table. Kitchen appliance also either cost an arm and a leg or won't last for 10 years (including buying replacement for the perishable parts)
The lower end is the market IKEA dominates.
> television
They exactly saw this problem front and center and started pivoting to selling viewing data and pushing ads, getting "smart"
> computers
That's exactly why companies (the biggest cmputer purchasers) are led to leases instead of purchases, and those renew every 3 years. On the user side cheaper computers are also the mainstream, and people don't expect those to last 10 years.
I completely disagree with your examples. Cars have massively changed over time - even in short intervals, cars today offer a lot of value you wouldn't get even just 5 years ago in many models. And they're priced accordingly. Computers? Laptops got smaller, graphics improved, performance improved, etc. And still is. Televisions went from CRT to LCD, SD to HD, to OLED. There were continual reasons to upgrade.
The instant pot is like the Bialetti Moka pot - it's a simple device, that doesn't wear down quickly and isn't used enough to wear it down quickly. New devices don't differentiate nearly enough. And the used market is likely flooded with cheap ones that others stopped using.
All of those are examples of very challenged industries. Car dealers are scared of EVs because of the lack of maintenance revenue - many of them will fail.
Most computer retailers went bankrupt (remember Gateway?).
Kitchen appliances have been engineered down to break in 10 years.
Televisions are down to 2 or 3 panel manufacturers.
The bike business is famously broken.
Or you recognize that the product area it's in, and size the business to market and make it efficient for a long term run (probably growing shrinking according some metric of market adoption gap, demographics, household growth...). But that's crazy talk.
Counterpoint, we were gifted an instant pot and used it about half a dozen times before realizing it was an extra piece of kitchen equipment that did absolutely nothing for us in terms of food quality or ease of cooking. It sat in the back of a deep cupboard for a couple of years until we threw it away when we moved.
It's a tool. What you get out of it will depend on what you expect of it. What I try to tell people is that Instant Pot is not something that makes food better nor does it necessarily cook things faster. When you factor in the time it takes to get up to pressure and the time it takes for it release it, it isn't necessarily faster than normal cooking.
What is does do it take care of itself. In other words, I can throw a bunch of stuff in the pot, configure it for cook time then turn off the heat, set a timer and know that in 45 minutes it will be ready to serve. In a house hold where multitasking is a necessity, that is a huge boon. Finally, one pot to clean up.
There is also the pressure cooker option. That's where our household gets the most mileage out of it. Pressure cooking is easy. Instant Pot pressure cooking is automagic.
Pressure cooking itself is magical but the InstantPot is like a level one mage casting magical missile. Even the “high pressure” setting is pretty low compared to a real pressure cooker.
Instant Pot sold a model called the Max which went up to the full pressure of stovetop pressure cookers. It didn’t sell. The problem is that it took so much longer to reach the highest pressure. The main limitation? North American household 110V 15-amp circuits max out at 1650W (and typical appliances max out around 1350W to leave margin).
If we had European 240V circuits we could have an Instant Pot designed for well over 2000W and it wouldn’t be an issue.
The same story goes for electric kettles. Alec of Technology Connections [1] went into extensive detail about it!
My instant pot (the “ultra” model) only draws a maximum of 700w. It’s very annoying that they seemingly cheaped out on the heating element, it makes it take way too long to get up to pressure.
Yup. I have an EU version, the heating element draws exactly 1000W during the pressurization cycle. It takes pretty much the same time to pressurize as the US version does.
Yes, you might not use it as an industrial broaster, which requires a significant amount of pressure. But for most home use, InstaPot is painless. And the cleanup is really easy.
Pressure cooking is magic. Your dhal is reliably done after 30 minutes, even with an old batch of beans. Before, I might have waited 2 hours, and dinner was till not ready because the beans were too old.
Regarding the set it and forget it, I can reliably steam to perfection any of the vegetables we regularly eat just by setting the pressure cook time to one minute. I don't have to constantly monitor the firmness, worry about the pot running out of water, or have uneven results. The device is worth it for that alone.
For me, culinarily, it is basically a slow cooker that produces acceptable results, and also isn't necessarily slow either. We do ribs a lot in the instant pot and while I disagree with just about every recipe on the internet and add 10-15 more minutes than they specify, it is still faster than conventional methods because the extra heat does matter. We also use it as a rice cooker a lot; whether or not it is faster it is convenient, and, you know, we have one, which makes it cheaper than buying a dedicated rice cooker.
- Hard-boiled eggs. Takes just 5 minutes. Not much time savings, but the eggs are consistently easy to peel and yes, I've tried it Serious Eats way too.
- Incubating yogurt. Makes a perfect batch of four mason jars worth every time.
- Risotto. Saves the 30 minutes of attending to rice where you slowly ladle in the broth.
- Black beans. Start from dry beans in a pinch, no soaking needed.
I'm doing a complete tear down remodel of the kitchen so I bought some devices to make our 95% cooked from scratch meal lifestyle bearable through the awful times.
A top of the line Breville toaster oven was the first, it's fantastic, but it is also silly to compare it to our 25 y/o Viking duel fuel range, waiting to reenter our life.
A week ago I got my Instant Pot Pro, and I've been putting it through its paces. I boiled some eggs. This is what really irks me about IP fans: it does not take 5 minutes. It has some indeterminate amount of preheat, the 5 min., and then a cool down. The eggs are just fine, as flawless as the following method on a quality gas burner stove: Put eggs and water into pot to just cover, turn burner high"ish"; when bubbles just start, turn down to a very very slow bubble generation and set timer for 10m (12-13min at 5500' elevation), scoop out the eggs when the timer expires and put on the counter, peel when cool enough. I very rarely had to spend any attention monitoring this. The IP is just, but only just, as good.
BUT ITS NOT FIVE MINUTES.
Shouting because why do instant pot fans do this?
Now, I am quite interested in the yogurt thing. That sounds very cool, we love yogurt and industrial yogurt, meh. Also strawberries are cheap right now and I'm thinking of making some exotic French confitures, and mixing that with the yogurt.
Risotto? No brainer on a decent stove. Dried beans? I also have a 30 y/o Magefesa pressure cooker that has a thicker bottom than the instant pot "pot" and does dried beans perfectly. No magic, or even "instant", there.
Another gripe: compared to the Breville that roller knob in the center is a gawdawlful POS. Reeks of cheap.
Compared to the 15 y/o electric range that is going to be tossed out the back doors, and then shot multiple times with 12 gauge 3" buckshot loads, the IP is great, so maybe I'm a little sad that the inevitable PE bankrupt/shitify it happened to it too.
But there's a very big difference when it comes to convenience: the Instant Pot (Or in my case the Sage/Breville Fast Slow Pro, which is great) has a built in timer and cooks automatically. Once you hit "start", you can walk away and come back any time to perfectly cooked eggs.
With a stove top method, you have to stand there and watch the timer, and manually turn off your stove when it's done.
I do! If I'm making boiled eggs its usually for a salad, so I want to make the eggs in advance and let them cool down before use anyway. It's nice to be able to set and forget and not have to babysit the pot or risk overcooking them. The pressure-cook method also adds a nice level of no-effort precision: if you want them slightly softer or harder you can just adjust the cook time by a minute or two. But with a pot if you want that level of precision you really have to babysit it... first wait for the water to boil, then add the eggs (risking cracking them when dropping in to boiling water), and start the timer, wait for timer, take them out as soon as timer goes off... it's just so much easier when you can skip all these steps!
There's also another advantage of the instant pot method: because it's cooking under pressure, it compresses the whites very slightly inside the shells as they cook. This means the shells always peel very easily from the eggs! Often when stovetop cooking, I'd get the shells sticking to the eggs which makes them difficult to peel.
When I make eggs in the Instant Pot, I do it on high pressure for 4 minutes, then immediately vent and plunge them into ice water. If I left them in any longer than that or even if I skip the ice bath, they'd be very overdone. I don't see how you can leave them unattended and not end up with very overdone and rubbery eggs.
In fact, if the Instant Pot has any disadvantage vs doing them in a pot, it's that the texture of the whites isn't as nice. The short cooking time that I use helps with that, but you have to be okay with not fully done yolks (which is something I prefer anyway).
I usually do take them out fairly quickly after I hear the end alarm. I also prefer yolks which are still a tiny bit runny, so I agree that a short cooking time and removing them quickly works best!
But it's not the end of the world if you don't as it cools down quite quickly when it vents (if set to quick-release). They might be slightly overdone, but certainly not as bad as forgetting them and leaving them boiling in a pot for 15+ minutes. Which I've done more times than I care to admit.
I usually make boiled eggs when I take food somewhere (be it for hiking or a lunch in the park). But I also drop them into cold water once they are cooked to stop the cooking, so they are quickly not that hot anymore.
Not having to worry about the timing does sound nice!
(Hmmm... with hatenjoy I may finally have ticked "create a legit googlewhack" off my bucket list. I see some usages that appear to be "Hat Enjoy" jammed together as a domain name or company name but a portmanteau of hate-enjoy Google is not finding for me. Of course Google isn't what it used to be...)
In my Instant Pot it's about 3-4 minutes to bring maybe 4 oz of water to pressure, 4 minutes to pressure cook, maybe a minute to release pressure and I'll do 8 eggs. So that's like half the cooking time.
Cooling time is the same. I plunge the eggs into an ice bath for 5 minutes before refrigerating.
I don't really do it for the time savings though. I mostly do it because it gives me a more consistent result. My egg yolks are always cooked exactly to the same doneness and the eggs are always easy to peel, even when starting with fresh eggs. (Freshness is the primary determinant of how easy eggs are to peel with older eggs being easier to peel than fresh eggs.)
I found that making them using the Serious Eats recipe I didn't always get consistent doneness (it's a lot harder to get the water temp exactly the same on a gas stove even with a thermometer). I also found they weren't always easy to peel.
So yes, the Instant Pot does save me time even with eggs where the time savings is minimal. More importantly it gives me a more consistent result with less attention from me.
YMMV.
On Rissoto, yes it's easy on a stove. But it requires you to stand there for 30 minutes lading in broth a little at a time. At least that's always the way I've done it to get a really nice result. On the Instant Pot, I can add all the ingredients at once an hit a button and 30 minutes later it's perfectly done w/o having required 30 minutes of my attention. I don't do it for the time savings. I do it because it's easier.
On beans, I didn't own a pressure cooker already.
On the yogurt, I never had consistent results trying to incubate naturally. I also tried a Yogotherm, coolers, my oven, the counter. Nothing worked. So I resolved that I needed to buy an incubator and when I learned the Instant Pot could do that and more, I bought it. It was like $80 on sale. I've been making perfect yogurt for like two years now.
Here's my recipe for creamy and nicely tart Bulgarian yogurt.
(I basically clone White Mountain.)
Fill four mason jars with whole milk. I use the Whole Foods brand ultra pasteurized whole milk. Screw lids loosely in place. Put jars into Instant Pot on top of the trivet. Fill with water till it comes up about 3/4 the way up the jars. Place lid on Instant Pot and set it to sous vide setting, 190° for 30 minutes.
When done pasteurizing, remove the mason jars and place them in cool (not cold or they will crack) water. I do this in my sink. After about 15 minutes remove the lid from one and check the temperature is below 110°. If not wait a bit longer. You could just let them cool on the counter top too but I'm a bit impatient with this step.
Add 1 tsp of starter to each jar and stir lightly. Put mason jars back in Instant Pot. Place lid on. Incubate for 8 hours. Once it's done incubating, place jars on counter for an hour or so, then move to the fridge.
For a starter, I use White Mountain Bulgarian Yogurt for a fresh batch. Then I can chain my own yogurt along as starter for months at a time.
I prefer to mix things into my yogurt when I eat it so I like to keep the yogurt itself nice and tart and don't mix anything in to the jars.
I make the yogurt in the mason jars from the start so I don't have to transfer it when it's done.
I make my own mostly because I enjoy making my own food. But it's also a lot cheaper and a bit easier on the environment. A 32 oz glass jar of White Mountain yogurt is almost $10 whereas a gallon of Whole Foods milk is $7.00. So $7 vs $40, and four fewer glass jars each batch.
Since I start by cloning White Mountain, my yogurt is basically identical and the taste is the same.
That is interesting. Like OP, we use ours constantly. I consider it to be the kitchen appliance I would never do without. I wonder if it comes down to OP and we making more similar foods than what you eat.
Interestingly, different people also use pressure cookers in entirely different ways, which I learned when my partner and I moved in together, and we both brought an Instant Pot the household.
I use mine exclusively for single items that I want to cook efficiently in bulk - eggs, beans, potatoes, yams, etc. (Most recently, made a pot full of chick peas this weekend to split between hummus and a quinoa salad.)
She uses hers for single-pot soups, stews, etc. that are ready to eat as-is.
This is quite possible. I use mine to cook wild rice, which takes awhile stovetop. And hard boiled eggs, which come out great. Everything else I've tried with it, I might as well just cook with the stove or oven. I don't like most recipes I've seen and am somewhat of a picky eater.
I have one from my sister-in-law, that she got from her (Israeli) partner's grandmother, which is a very traditional Israeli hummus recipe. That recipe is for stovetop and I adapted it to the instant pot.
The trick is to use baking soda when you cook the chickpeas in the instant pot, because it dissolves/softens the shells. Then you take them out and rinse thoroughly in water to get rid the baking soda taste, before slapping them into a food processor with tahini and whatever else.
Good quality tahini also makes a difference. Lots of north American brands have a wildly different taste than what's common in the middle east.
It is wonderful to use instead of an oven since it doesn't heat up the whole room and you can pressure cook dry beans without soaking to fully done in about 20 - 30 minutes.
> It is wonderful to use instead of an oven since it doesn't heat up the whole room
Energy efficiency is a big point. Between my Instant Pot and Air Fryer I have few opportunities to turn on the oven. These devices heat up faster, cook faster, and provide more consistent results. This is especially true now that I'm an empty nester and no longer cooking for a large family. It also makes it easy to resist the temptation to rely on processed foods.
If I’m being really miserly about heat output and/or food smells I’ll walk my pot out to the back deck to release. (Could also plug into an outdoor outlet to cook, but gets logistically complicated with timing if I’m not already hanging out on the deck.)
You're missing out, because you should be using it to make beans. As a bean cooker, it turns a annoying multi-hour job into from dry to beautifully cooked in an hour. As a rice cooker, you should just use a rice cooker, they're like 1/3 the price and you can run it at the same time as the bean cooker.
YMMV, but the rice cooker is mostly collecting dust since I got and Instant Pot. Why? The IP is much faster than a rice cooker. Also, the inner vessel is more durable - it's stainless steel (as opposed to the non-stick coating in the rice cooker), so no worries about scratches, dishwasher, etc... .
It's not just the convenience. Pressure cookers are way more energy efficient than boiling a big pot of food on an electric stove. If you're using an electric air conditioner to re-extract that heat from your house, the savings are even bigger.
You do need to know how long your food needs to cook up front, or be tolerant of overcooked food.
> We have an Instant Pot and use it. All. The. Time. It is a well made product that is simple to use, has a good feature set, is useful, and relatively inexpensive
You may have just described why they're filing for bankruptcy.
While I do not own an Instant Pot, I do own an awful lot of Pyrex cookware that I bought well over a decade ago... My mother has Pyrex cookware she's owned for decades and will likely pass down one day.
It's hard to build a lasting company when your customer's buy once and never again. Perhaps there's really such a thing as "too good".
Not at all - as long as they're earning a profit on each one large enough to justify having produced it, then they lose nothing by their products lasting a long time. The worst outcome might be that the market becomes saturated and everybody already has one or two, in which case the business just scales down and goes away, having earned a lot of money. But I doubt even that outcome in this case.
It sounds like you're getting a lot of value from your purchase, which is great. But this doesn't mean that the company made any money by selling it to you. Maybe they did or not, but that's a different question.
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.
From the EU Pyrex webpage, when they talk about their materials in the French factory, they say it's borosilicate:
The Pyrex® glass is unique. It is a borosilicate glass that is tempered, of superior quality and has a great thermal and mechanical shock resistance. [...] The Pyrex® glass is made of pure sand (80%), soda (4%), Alumina (2,5%) and bore (13%).
So I'd say that at least EU Pyrex is safer (when talking about thermal shock, I guess).
PD: Following the life of Pyrex, Duralex and Saint-Gobain is quite a thing...
Anchor Hocking is still around. For now. But if this pattern of private equity destroying trusted brands continues, one can only imagine how difficult it will be as a consumer to purchase well-made household commodities. I do not want to navigate a world where the provenance of every product is unknown, its white-label manufacturing origins hidden behind an alphabet soup name like MALACASA, KOMUEE, or M MCIRCO (all actual names of oven safe glassware products for sale today).
> be as a consumer to purchase well-made household commodities. I do not want to navigate a world where the provenance of every product is unknown
This is not a coincidental phenomenon, it's a deliberate end goal. Private equity is part of the problem, but more broadly the problem is that of consolidation and market incentives for behavior other than selling the best product at the best price. It's easy to blame government for not creating the right incentives or failing to create the right disincentives, but realistically corporations themselves have tremendous incentive to co-opt, subvert, and otherwise manipulate government decision-making processes and regulatory agencies.
> "At eight or nine or 10 per cent, that's $50 million a year just to service the debt — it's impossible to do," he said. "You can only sell so many Instant Pots."
Well it seems like maybe that's something you should have thought of before taking on that much debt?
Maybe you should consider a subscription model.... wait, no.
Has instant pot ever made a dual voltage version that works in USA and Europe? I really want to use mine for nomad'ing but not have two versions. It seems like this is probably more expensive when high voltage is involved? I noticed there is no dual voltage Vitamix product as well.
It's fairly easy to handle dual voltage for switch-mode power supplies like used on electronic devices, but a resistive heating element like used in a pressure cooker typically runs directly from line voltage, and needs to have its resistance tuned to draw the right amount of current for the power line voltage. A resistor tuned for 120V would draw 2x as much current (and therefore 4x as much power) on 240V, and probably burn out.
You can get clever by splitting your resistor in half, and then using relays to put those halves either in series for 240V or parallel for 120V, but that adds cost and complexity. Since most consumers don't need this functionality, it's easier to just sell two different SKUs with different heating elements.
High-power motors like used in blenders are similar - you'll use motors with different number of windings at different line voltages, otherwise your motor would be horribly underpowered at 120V or burn out at 240V.
Power transformers exist which can convert between 120V and 240V, but they're not cheap.
This is a shame - I have one of their combo air-fryers/pressure-cookers and although it is only a passable air-fryer, it is the best pressure cooker I have ever used and very good value for the relatively cheap price.
I tried their air fryer. Could not get rid of the toxic smell despite numerous, extended burn-in sessions, cooking in it, re-cleaning it, spraying oil in it, etc. Eventually gave up and got rid of it. It had great features but the smell was terrible.
I’m not too surprised. Since introducing the Instant Pot there has been a lot of competition on their main product (pressure cooker). It seems like a race to the bottom for cost and so they must have faced shrinking profit margins. Also, they were diversifying their product offering into products that seemed like they were grasping and not really aligned with their main offering.
Yup, they were trying really hard to break into the pod coffee game by making machines (but not pods, lol razor/blade model backwards) the machines were neat, they have a combo Nespresso/Keurig machine we bought but it was kinda bad at both.
I have an instant pot and it's been going strong for the last 5 years.
The main reason I got it instead of a competitor is the amount of recipes out there on the internet specifically for the instant pot which show the exact settings to use, step by step.
Hopefully there will be some kind of market for aftermarket spare parts and repairs, if the company completely shuts down.
They're almost certainly not going to stop making Instant Pots. This is a chapter 11 bankruptcy -- the kind where the business gets restructured but continues to operate.
Faberware and Ninja make some, and I'm sure if the IP IP doesn't get slurped up, Walmart and friends will make store-brand ones. They're not very complicated.
I <3 my Ninja multi-cooker, but they do a HORRIBLE job of marketing the thing with the name alone: Ninja® Foodi® 14-in-1 8-qt. SMART XL Pressure Cooker Steam Fryer with SmartLid®
It's like something I'd read for some white-labelled Chinese product on Amazon; but it's the single most heavily used appliance in my kitchen!
Interestingly, Canadian Tire (very well known establishment up here!) used to sell InstaPot, and pretty much always had it on special. Lately they've shifted toward Ninja brand items.
Guess I just bought a multipack of gaskets at the right time then. It's been one of the few products I've bought that have genuinely improved my quality of life. I made bulk meals for freezing when we had a newborn. I use it weekly at least.
I really hope that the corning portion of the company survives and continues to make pyrex, corelle, and corning products. They are some of my favorite ceramics and have been a staple for decades. I'm very sad to hear about this.
Until they disable the licensing server so the next time it needs to renew the license it fails and becomes unusable. So glad I bought that smart home pyrex set of dishes
I never quite understood the hype of Instant pot. It just seemed like an Electric pressure cooker. Breville has had one since the mid 00s, and my mother had a simpler Sears branded one in the 90s.
Was it bandwagon effect? It always seemed like one of those products you'd see on an infomercial. The overall build quality, particularly the front button membrane, looked extremely cheap to me, like what you'd see on random Wish.com crap.
The key thing for me was the stainless pot. Every other electric pressure cooker has a Teflon-coated pot that will get scratched, flake, discolour, go sticky and generally poison you after a couple of years. I guarded my old Moulinex pot like a mother bear her cubs and it still went weird. A Tefal rice cooker pan is still perfect, though, so I can do it, it's just pressure cooking seems too much hard work for Teflon to withstand.
1. The original stainless steel removable liner is embossed with nice, legible capacity levels. Unfortunately, they're way off: the "9 cup" line is actually about 12 cups. (Not a big deal; we just don't use the markings.)
2. I bought the Instant Pot Air Fryer Lid lid add-on, which was supposed to support temperatures of up to 400°F. But, after a lot of testing, I found that it was seriously limited as to the heat it would supply. Basically, the internal temperature never got over 360°F, and in fact after eight minutes of running the heater would turn off and the unit would cool down to 270°F and then maintain that temperature. All the while, the external temperature would happily show 400°F.
My guess: they discovered late in the development cycle that the air fryer lid would overheat and kill older Instant Pots. They couldn't fix this after the fact, so they modified the lid firmware to limit the actual temperatures, but keep displaying the desired temperature, hoping users wouldn't notice. (I complained, and they promptly send me a new lid. But, it had the same flaw.)
My Amazon review with the details: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2D14J5XXHC2GA . (Yes: I may have too much time on my hands...)
IMHO, a company which ships clearly flawed products and hopes their customers don't notice is just burning their reputation.