Hey, I am bruce Weinstein and

this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Martin. And I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, my husband, we have written 37 cookbooks, including the latest cold canning, small batch counting, no pressure or steam canner needed. Make two

or three jars of what? Apricot jams, strawberry jams, sour cherry preserves. Ketchup, Kim cheese, chutney, and serves Pickles, relishes. Mm-hmm. Dessert sauces. Hot bud Sauce.

Uh, like that and a Triple sec recipe that will, uh, rearrange your life for homemade, triple sec. Anyway, that book is out. Now we'll talk a little bit about that book in our one minute cooking tips, something we discovered as writing it. But what we really wanna talk about in this episode of the podcast is the rise and fall of the Instant Pot and what has happened to it since we rode that wave, at least partway. I wanna talk about what's happened to this. Instant pot over the years and why it has now fallen so far from its highs. And then we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip. Make sure you read labels when you buy distilled white vinegar in North America, because some of the major North American distilled white vinegar producers have decided to save money by diluting that vinegar. Not to the standard 5% acidity, but all the way down to 4% acidity. That's right. And that's a problem.

It is 4%. Acidity is not preservative for food. So if you've been used to pickling with. Distilled white vinegar. We're talking not about white wine vinegar. No, not about white slumming vinegar. We're talking about the old standard distilled white vinegar. Mm-hmm. Much of it is now dropped to 4% acidity, and you need to read those labels. If you are concerned about this, you do. Why?

Let's say you're making pickled cauliflower, right? Because you're already diluting that vinegar with water to make your brine right, so you're gonna dilute it one to one. It's gonna be much less acidic than it should be if you'd used 5% vinegar. And then after about a week, your cauliflower is gonna start to get mushy and degrade, and the brines getting cloudy. Not enough vinegar in there to preserve it for any length of time.

Right. So the acidity has gone down. So check the labels. You can find out the acidity rate by reading the label carefully, and then you'll note you have the right kind in hand for what you need. Mm-hmm. Okay. Before we get to the next part of this podcast, the rise and fall of the Instant Pod, let me say, it would be great if you could rate our podcast or even give it a review. If you can work to just simply write a simple review like Love the podcast, dare I Ask, or things like that. That is how you can keep us fresh in the analytics we are. Hoarded. That is the only kind of support we can get because that is the kind of support we choose to get. So if you can do that, that would be terrific. Otherwise, get ready. 'cause we want to talk about the rise and fall of the Instant Pot.

I wanna start this segment off by explaining what an Instant pot is. Okay. Because a lot of people use those words instant pot, and we will get to the fact that they actually call them ins instant pots. But a lot of people use those words to mean they have an electric pressure cooker. They do. And it's become this just sort of generic word for pressure cooker, electric pressure cookers like,

like in the South where where I grew up. You call any carbonated beverage Coke, even if it's, I don't know, strawberry soda you call it. What kind of coke do you want? Yeah. Coke is just the, the word you use for a carbonated soda.

But Instant Pot is a brand, and instant pot, as we said, is Instant pot, not Instant pot.

I think that. I think that people call the Insta Pot and you see a ton of posts online still for Insta Pot because of Instagram. That's my theory. Sure. Yeah. But it is officially the Instant Pot,

and it is an electric appliance that does have a pressure cooker function. Yep. And we will get to all of that, but it has had quite. A history, hasn't it? Well,

yeah, and don't you think that part of the reason that what you're saying is that people just refer to any electric pressure cooker as an instant pot simply speaks to the rise, the crazy rise of this gadget. Oh,

it's

fantastic. It took over the market. They were fantastic. They were all kinds of makers of electric pressure cookers. Fero, the Spanish brand,

even Cuisinart made one for years and all it did was Pressure cook.

Exactly. Yeah. People made other brands made electric pressure cookers, but the instant pop became such a sensation that it swamped. Every, like I said, Coke. Like Kleenex. Yep. Right. People call any anything. You blow your nose with a Kleenex and that's a brand name.

Yeah. Part of why I think the Instant Pot had that success were those two words in its name, instant Pot. Mm. What a brilliant. Brilliant marketing idea. You have this electric pressure cooker, which cooks things faster than any other appliance you may have except stove top pressure cooker. But it cooks things faster than any electric appliance you have. And you're calling it Instant Pot. Who doesn't wanna make dinner in there? Instant pot. It's magic.

Right. And we'll talk about that. The difference between it's instant pot and a stove top pressure cooker, the kind our grandmothers used. Mm-hmm. And the kind that Bruce still uses. Mm-hmm. To this day. We'll talk about the Differe in a minute. So we wanna talk about the rise, but we also wanna talk about how this has now fallen and this failure is, um, large. Mm-hmm. Uh, let me say that and affected a lot of people. It did. There are some people, and we're not gonna name any names, but there are some people who made a very decent career by hitching themselves to instant POTS and becoming social media influencers through instant pots, and ended up making. Big box over their online presence about the instant pop. Yeah. And those people are now high and dry.

Yeah. Because once the Instant Pot started to fade out of popularity, they had nothing else to hold onto. Yeah, that's right. You know, I will, I will say that Mark and I wrote the Instant Pop Bible and the Instant Pop Bible Next Generation and three other instant pop books. So we did ride that wave too, but we did not make it our entire identity. Yeah. It was yet. Five more books in our library of now 37 books that we've

written. And I think, I think I can tell you this, and this is a bit behind the scenes perhaps, but you know, writers live off both the advances on their books and then if their advances earn out, you sign. Uh, you sell enough copies that what they paid you upfront is now made up and now you start making money on each copy. You know, you live off your royalties. And we certainly started getting royalties off the Instant Pop Bible, but we were not as crazy popular as some of the other books. And there came this moment in which, oh, uh, all the big booksellers, independent booksellers, Amazon, all of them returned thousands of those books as the. FAD crashed. Mm-hmm. And we were expecting a royalty check at one point, and instead we ended up with a statement that had negative numbers because so many had been returned, that those numbers were pulled off our statement, and I can only imagine what some of those giant people felt at that moment as hundreds, even hundreds of thousands of their books were returned to the publisher. Mm-hmm. They went. Deep in the hole.

And I'll say that by that time, mark and I had already seen that there was less interest in it. And by the time that happened, we were already writing air fryer books because saw the rise of the air fryer. So we jumped on that kind of early on and we were really one of the first air fryer books out there. And so we did really well, but. Let's go back to the Instant Pot Right. And give you a little history about it. Right. So it was a company formed by Robert Wang. Um, he was Canadian. He's a scientist. He was an inventor. And it came out of Nortel.

Yeah. Uh, telecommunications Giant.

Mm-hmm. And he created this. Appliance with two partners in Ottawa, Canada. The partners left, he was joined by two guys from Blackberry.

Again, tech guys. These are all very entrepreneurial, techy kind of people

and, and they had this love of food and they loved to tinker around and so they came up with what they called the first. Six in one cooker, and I think this

is really important to just think about in terms of what happened with the Instant Pot, because their initial idea for the Instant Pot was not that it was a pressure cooker, but that it was a pressure cooker among other things. Mm-hmm. A rice cooker, a slow cooker yoga. A yogurt, a yogurt maker. Mm-hmm. All these. Things, and they believed that they had come up with this six in one gadget. There's a, there's a long standing myth story structure. I don't know in tech about the pivot that you come up with something and you have to be able to, in the middle of its process, pivot. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And do something else with it. Once it starts to become a success, and this is in fact what they went through. They went through a. Pivot because they came out with this thing that they were like, oh, look at six things in one and you

can get rid of all these other appliances and all you need is this one appliance. Mm-hmm. And when they came out with it, mark and I were writing the great big Pressure cooker book. It was 2015. We saw the Instant Pot out there. We got in touch with Robert where we, oh my God. I had a long conversation with him and we did not jump on the Instant Pot bandwagon for that book. So when we decided to write the great big Pressure Cooker book, we knew there were electric pressure cookers, just to say,

we're talking 20, we're writing it. 2014. It's published in 2015. Mm-hmm.

We knew there were electric pressure cookers out there, and we talked with our publisher and our editor and we decided the way to make this a fabulous pressure. Cooker book is in every recipe to give directions for how to cook in a stove top pressure cooker. And in an electric because they cook differently.

Yeah. I So I, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that's what I want you to say. How, why do they cook differently? Mm-hmm. Why? Why do we need two different sets of instructions for stove top and electric,

A stove top pressure cookers reach pressure of 15 PSI. And if you know anything about science, you know that as. Pressure increases. So does temperature so they get higher pressure and higher temperature inside the pot. Correct. So food will cook faster than it does in an electric pressure cooker because an electric pressure cooker only reaches 12

Ps. Right. So just to be, just to be dumbly scientific about this. At sea level, as you probably know, water boils at two 12 Fahrenheit or a hundred Celsius, right? Mm-hmm. You know that it belt boils right there, but if you put water under incredible pressure, you can actually get the temperature of the water above two 12 up into the 2 30, 2 40 Fahrenheit range. Depending, you can get it higher than that, depending on how much pressure you put on it. So the temperature of the water gets hotter. Even as it boils in normal circumstances, the minute water hits two 12, it evaporates, it becomes gas. It stops

getting hotter at that point. That's right. Mm-hmm. So,

and you know, yes, all the liquid, all the gas. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's coming out of the liquid or it's turning into gas from a liquid, but you can actually slow down that process. Inside of our pressure cooker. Okay, so when we were writing the book again, Bruce said, we left the Instant Pot out and we thought it was a bit of a gimmick, and here's why. So the first six in one cooker, what they thought was the thing came out in about 2013. It came out much hotter in Canada than it came out in the United States, but it was still hot even in the United States. And we looked at it and by the time we were writing a year later, Robert Wang is an incessant. Inventor. Mm-hmm. And he was already tinkering with the pot. Mm-hmm. And what he was doing, he was adding lots of buttons for meat and grains and all this stuff. All of these were for the pressure cooking setting. It was blowing out into all of these buttons. And to be honest with you, and this is the honest to God truth, those buttons all cook at exactly the same pressure. Mm-hmm. They're put on there so that it alters the timing slightly, but you can even change. The timing with any of those buttons. So in other words, you can cook a piece of chicken with the meat button or the grain button, or whatever button you want. That's a pressure cooked button. So long as you adjust the timing appropriately,

and our feeling is. You need to follow the timings in your recipes, not use the timings built into the machines and given that it was still a six in one cooker, and by the time we were writing the book, they were doing the seven in one cooker and the nine in one cooker. Right, right. We thought that was gonna be confusing in our great big pressure cooker book. So here's the instructions for using. An standard electric pressure cooker, which has pressure settings or the stove top. And then what we have to add a third set of instructions for how to use the Instant Pot. And to be honest, we're already now on the second generation Instant Pot, and each time it comes out. Robert Wang is changing the buttons. So we're gonna be giving you a book that's outdated before it's even published. That's

right. And so for the book, just to say, for the great big brush cooker book, we particularly got associated with the Spanish match manufacturer fa, because they were making both stove top. And electric pressure cookers and you know, they did a lot of publicity for us for that book. It was really great. Mm-hmm. We went on QVC with that book. It was all great and et cetera. Mm-hmm. However, that book can, in 2015. In 2016, the Instant Pot proved to be the number one bestseller on Amazon Prime Day. And this is back in the day when Prime Day was. A day instead of whatever it is now, four months, but it was a day. Mm-hmm. And you know, you had this one day instant, uh, Amazon Prime Day and the Instant Pot outsold everything else by far, all across the Amazon site.

So you put two and two together. We had a very successful, great big pressure cooker book, and Instant Pot is now selling out everything and rising Meteorically on Amazon. So we went to a new publisher and the new publisher said to us, I love what you did with your great big pressure Cooker book. I would like you to do the same

from three Sellout. Uh, uh uh, it was three Sellout Moments on QVC. Mm-hmm. Yes. He loved that.

He said, I think you could do the same thing for Instant Pot. I would like you to write just an instant pop book and let's go for it. So we did. Now, the thing about the instant pop bible that we wrote is we had to take into account all the different models. 'cause by now yeah, there's three or four different models. Yeah, yeah. And it starts to get a little complicated. Robert w. Even decided at one point he called me 'cause we were talking a lot. He would send me samples of the Instant bot right off the line in the Chinese

factories. He would go down to the lines if he was where they were being made, or he would have them pulled right off the line and he would literally throw it in a box and mail it to Bruce. And

it was written on the, on the side of it, in indelible marker that you know not for sale. You may not share this with anybody. This is off the line. Secrets. It was really crazy. And he,

didn't we even sign an NDA at one point with him? I think so did we? I think you did. I Wouldn think you signed an NDA with him. Wouldn't

did. And it was all about this next feature. So he calls me and he says, so I'm sending you something because I am revolutionizing the Instant Pot. I said, well, the part was a revolution. So what now? And he said, well, you know how Stove top pressure cookers can get to 15 PSI and the Instant pots can only get to 12 PSI as can all maybe 13, 12 or 13. Yes, as can all electric pressure cookers. He said, I'm developing a new model of Instant Pot that offers you the ability to go all the way up to 15 PSI so it will cook as hot and as fast as a stove top.

And this is a huge thing. And in fact, it. It formed how we wrote the books because in the end we wrote the instant pop books so that there were recipes that could be used, um, with most instant pots. And then the same recipe had to have a separate set of timings for this New Max model, which if you used Max, it had all these feet. Robert Wang ever. The tinkerer, an inventor, the the Max model automatically shut the. Pressure valve. Mm-hmm. You didn't have to manually do anything with it, and it automatically opened it up and as Bruce says, it came up to the full 15 PSI that a stove top pressure cooker will do. By the way, just to say none of this, uh, comes up to the level that pressure canners come up to. No. That's a whole nother, that's a, a whole different thing. These are pressure cookers. Well,

as a chef, I fell in love with that. That 15 PSI thing that the Max could do. Right. And that's the, I was so excited about that. But what we didn't take into consideration was, one, the Max machine was much more expensive than the other. So it was never going to sell Quite as well or become as popular.

Correct.

And two. People who don't have a max machine, were just confused by those instructions in our recipes. Well, yeah. They were like, well, what's Max? I don't know even what you're talking about.

And here's the thing, Robert kept it reinventing it, and this is not a fault and why it failed, actually. Mm-hmm. But Robert kept reinventing it. And you know, how many instant pots do you need? I know people did end up with six, eight. I would see social media posts with people who had a rack. Of instant pots in their home, and they were so happy that their spouse built them this rack for the pots and all that kind of stuff. And they had many different models, but most people did not need continued updates of this machine itself. So this was, you know, all happening. It was still really hot and as it peaked and as it hit the top of its hotness in 2019, instant, instant. Brands, the Instant Pod company was sold to Chore Brands, and you may know Corll. Dinnerware. Yep. Okay, so Carell Brands was one piece of a larger portfolio owned by an investment. Banker, private equity firm, Carell Capital, they owned Corning. They own Pyrex, and now they own the instant brands and the, they bought it for Billions. Billions, I think they billion. They spent a fortune, which is exactly as an entrepreneur, what you want to happen to product. He

did a brilliant, brilliant move. He built a company from scratch. It became super popular. He kept making new and exciting models that people kept buying. And after he'd made so much money making this. This Instant Pod, he sold the company for billions. So

good for him. Lemme say The Instant Pod and the Instant Brands. They made this huge success through social media. They did almost no traditional advertising. They literally became a viral phenomenon and he wrote it. Out until he could sell it for as much as one could imagine to Carell Brands, which as I say, was owned by Carell Capital, and if you know anything about private equity firms and how they work, they took this brand, the Instant brand, and they loaded it with debt. They borrowed a ton of money against the brand name. The brand could never pay back all that money, and so they were then able to put it into bankruptcy. That is kind of the s. Standard operating procedure of private equity firms to find a popular brand. Just pull as much debt onto it as you can possibly do it. No, it will never make up this debt. Mm-hmm. Very sad. And then pull it into bankruptcy. And that cash that you borrowed on it is now yours. That happened to it. Over time, the company started to degrade and then came the big degrade, which was in 2023.

Lemme say that online, if you watched what was happening, the people who were instant potheads, who had all those things, right, they called themselves potheads, right? They watched instant brands create many more appliances. Even the many varieties of instant pots, they did air fryers, right? Uh, they did blenders, rotisserie,

didn't they do a rotisserie thing for one? There was rot,

there was a rotisserie built into some of their air fryers. That's right. And so what people online were saying, oh, well they're going bankrupt because they expanded too fast. They made too many kinds of products. And what Mark and I kept saying to ourselves is. No. They made all these things, which is what made them a success and made them attractive to Right. Corral brands. Correct. And Carell said, oh, we could scrape all that lovely money out of there and become rich ourselves, which

is what they did. That's exactly what they did. And so they put it into bankruptcy in 2023, instant France was acquired by Center Lane. Partners, another private equity firm. They actually just bought the Appliance division of Instant Brands. And now I'm gonna tell you something, and this is a little political, but I don't want any political commentary here. I'm just gonna tell you the facts of what happened. Okay. So Center Lane Partners owned a portfolio of various products. They owned Pyrex, they owned the old glass. Company from Pennsylvania, anchor Hawking. They owned Linux. You made Linux from China and Flatware and that kind of stuff. Um, now they own the Instant Brands because Center Lane Partners owned both Pyrex and. Anchor Hawking Center Lane Partners came under the eye of the US Antitrust Department and they started to be investigated for antitrust violations, not having anything to do with the Instant Pot. Mm-hmm. With having everything to do with the connection between Pyrex and Anchor Hawking. I believe they even put the factory for Anchor Hawking out of business. They did. They did Pennsylvania. So here's the. Brand did. Here's what the firm, the private equity firm did, and again, I don't want to be political here. I just wanna tell you the facts. What the firm did is it began bringing out Linux, China, Linux, flatware, and Instant Pots, as well as even some glass square through Anchor Hawking, all with the Trump. Brand on them. They did this so that they could ease their way out of regulation. Essentially this was the new kind of lobbying, which is part flattery, that in other words, we will put out Trump bla branded appliances and this will help ease us back out of regulation. Again, I don't wanna get political right in the

hopes. He gives us a free pass.

That's right. But whatever you think about this move politically, and again, I don't care, but whatever you think about it, this further damaged the instant brand, right? Because politics are so divisive in the United States that people discovered that Instant Brands was putting out a Trump branded Instant Pot, and they all got away from it. Whole, um, groups online and fire sales of Instant Pots, and I gotta get rid of my Instant Pot. 'cause now they're with Trump. They, they're not really with Trump. They're not really with Trump. It's this weird backdoor lobbying campaign in order to get the US Justice Department off their tails for antitrust violations.

And that was really the. Final decline of the Instapot. It, it has been still. They're still out there. People still have 'em. We still have them. I love the ones I have.

And let's say that the Trump branded products was particularly devastating to the original audience of the INS Instant Pod. Mm-hmm. The Canadian audience, which the sales just fell off the hook at that point.

So at the height. Instant pot. And when we were writing all the books, I probably had about 25 instant pots in the house. You did? You did. And I have, of course, given so many away and kept my favorite. So what I have kept is a three quart instant pot because it's the perfect size for just like making potatoes for mashed potatoes from Mark and me, um, for making just a small amount of broth if I have, you know, a bunch of chicken wings and a neck and a few legs. I got rid of all of my six quarts, which was the standard one, but I kept an eight quart and a 10 quart. The giant ones. The giant ones, the eight quart is great 'cause you could make, you know so much, use so much in it as once and the 10 quart. Here's what I love about the 10 quart. What I loved about the Insta bot in general was pasta. You could cook pasta, spaghetti, zdi, rigatoni. In your sauce, right? You build a sauce, you put the pasta in, you put it on, and five minutes later it's done. In the 10 court, you could cook spaghetti without breaking it. To fit the pot, it fit the whole box of spaghetti. And

I will say that, uh, we still have these pots and I, uh, and as you know, the writer in the pair of us, but I use them. Exclusively as slow cookers at this point. I used the slow cooker function to make chili after Bruce's concert, stuff like that. I rarely ever use the pressure cooker setting of them. So that's the whole story, how this thing became a phenomenon through social media. People built careers off of it. Mm-hmm. As. Influencers. Then the things started to fall apart. Not because it became too popular, not because they began innovating too much, but because they innovated it until they were at the peak of their popularity. It got sold and then it got sold. Again, and then there came this political problem and it really now has collapsed. As I say, I've seen actually parties online with people selling on Facebook marketplace, their instant pots for a dollar to get rid of them. This is all part of the political polarization in the United States. Ca Canada's distrust of the United States. Yeah. At this moment it's all part of what's happening around it, and the pot is just continuing to tank underneath us. So. That's the rise and fall of the Insat. You wanna add anything?

Yeah, that I am not selling mine. I don't care what's happened to the company. I love my three Insta Bots. They are mine and no one can have

them. Okay. So there you go. That's the rise and fall of the In Instant Bot. So before we get to the final segment of this podcast, let me say that we have, uh, great social media group available to you. In fact, we have a TikTok channel named Cooking with. Bruce and Mark just the same name as his podcast, and we've recently had some videos actually go viral on TikTok. Mm-hmm. You might wanna check us out on TikTok, uh, cooking with Bruce and Mark. Were making food for each other. I think we're, uh, pickling cherry tomatoes right now and making a really spicy carrot. Mm-hmm. What? Conant Jam? Mm-hmm. Carrot Jam. But it's more like a condiment for soft. Cheese and for hamburgers, that kind of thing. Uh, those videos are actually going viral right now, and we're kind of proud of that. So check us out on TikTok, uh, cooking, Bruce and Mark, as well as of course, subscribing to this podcast. Okay. As is traditional, the final segment, what's making us happy in food this week?

Head on shrimp. Skewered and grilled marinated Vietnamese style. We had a dinner party last night. Mm-hmm. It was our friend's grandson's. 14th birthday we did. And we said we would have the whole family over for dinner 'cause he loves fish. And we did a big what?

Nine of them came right? Well the grandkids Two different. Two different. Our friends, their kids, two couples that are their kids. Plus three grandkids. Mm-hmm.

Including the birthday boy who wanted fish. So I did a home mixed fish grill, including head on shrimp, which I got at Costco. These were like, U nines means fewer than nine shrimp per pound, so they were giant. I skewered them. I marinated them in fish sauce and curry paste and lime juice and brown sugar. They were so yummy. So that made me happy.

It was really good. Uh, I think what's made me happy in food this week are spiced pickled plums. And if you go out to Melissa's, produce the organic. Produce, uh, seller. If you go down to their site on YouTube, you'll see Bruce and I did, uh, an event for them. We did a cooking event for them that went on YouTube live and now it's just living on YouTube. So Melissa's produce and we make these spiced pickled plums from cold canning, our latest book, and they are so delicious. If you grew up in the south, like me, you may know about spiced peaches. These plums are fantastic. Mm-hmm. And in fact, people ate them last night with all this. Fish off the grill. I'm not sure they exactly go with fish, but they were simply tasty. They, with everything. One person at the table claimed he was fighting not to go back for a second plum. So there you go. There was a lot of food on the table. So there you go. So that's the podcast for this week. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for being a part of this journey and thanks for being, um, with us every step of this way.

And if you're paying attention to social media, you know, there's a lot of AI out there and a lot of videos that are totally. Made up. They're bots. They're not real. But when you go to watch Bruce and Mark on cooking with Bruce and Mark on our TikTok channel, on our Instagram channel, on YouTube, on our Facebook channel, you are always going to get us. You are never gonna get ai. That is our promise to you here on cooking with Bruce and Mark.