Remember the early Instant Pot craze? Remember Amazon Prime Day in 2016? If the history of kitchen appliances is written into the history of our shared civilization, this date will surely go down in history as the peak of the Instant Pot. Amazon sold 215,000 Instant Pots in 24 hours, and probably more if that number wasn't in stock. Instant Pot also dominated Prime Days in 2017 and 2018.
As the saying goes, that was a long time ago. Now we come together to mourn the Instant Pot. This isn't an obituary, because the device's parent company, Instant Brands, recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but the Instant Pot is still for sale. Instead, we're saying goodbye to that innocent moment when it seemed like the Instant Pot would finally answer all our culinary desires and make cooking dinner a breeze.
The graveyard of kitchen trends is wide and deep, littered across the country with the equivalent of white dwarfs that shone with astonishing brightness for a moment and then collapsed into space junk. The allure of invention in this field is understandable: preparing food is a Sisyphean drudgery, and anything that promises to make it faster, easier, better, healthier, or more enjoyable is appealing and often profitable for its manufacturer, at least for a while. Some cooking “tools” are so specialized and unnecessary that they're rarely needed. Think microwave s'mores makers, pancake pens, carrot shavers, hot dog slicers, butter cutters, and more. Many of these haven't disappeared entirely, just gone from ubiquitous (or at least Christmas gift-list staples) to rarefied, from something you absolutely need and use to a dust catcher that'll be front and center at the next Goodwill donation.
Other kitchen items, such as fondue pots, are so culturally and stylistically representative of an era that they become shorthand for an era or a way of entertaining, even long after anyone began using them regularly. (Fondue has been around for centuries in Europe, but it didn't catch on here until the 1960s and 1970s, after which fondue pots were forgotten and became flea-market staples.) There's a whole array of coveted appliances that make something easy much harder, but promise to make you better and feel better for having done it. The home bread maker hit the market in 1986, and by the mid-1990s millions of Americans were convinced they owned one and planned to bake fresh bread every day for the rest of their lives. Apparently this wasn't the case: at last count, more than 10,000 bread makers were listed for sale on eBay, though many were second-hand. (“Zojirushi Bread Maker BBCC-V20 Home Bakery 2 lbs. This machine was purchased by one adult, me, and used a few times.”) So are ice cream makers. And how many of us have a George Foreman grill relegated deep in a cabinet? What about panini makers? Crock-pots? Sous vide cookers?
Amid the vast ruins of discarded kitchen gadgets, one appliance has remained surprisingly durable: the microwave. For many of us, the microwave is only used to heat coffee or soften ice cream—not essential cooking tasks. Yet more than 90% of American kitchens contain one. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that when microwaves were first sold for home use in the mid-1950s, they were feared rather than respected, considered countertop nuclear reactors that would mutate when they made popcorn. Over time, the best-selling book “The Microwave Gourmet” by Barbara Kafka and a powerful advertising campaign by Raytheon, maker of perhaps the most popular microwave oven of all time, seemed to appease the public and convince them that they could actually cook food in a microwave. Cook With the arrival of these little metal shoeboxes, the microwave oven, against all odds, became as standard in the kitchen as the stove or refrigerator.
Where does the Instant Pot fit into this patchy lineage? Introduced in 2010 by a team of Canadian engineers, the product had a Veg-o-Matic-like premise: a chunky, multi-functional vessel that could function as a pressure cooker (fast), slow cooker (low), rice cooker, steamer, warmer, egg cooker, baby-bottle sterilizer, and yogurt maker. It spread by word of mouth and garnered tens of thousands of fans without any advertising. By 2017, the Instant Pot Facebook group had 750,000 members, and the product had more than 39,000 reviews on Amazon, according to CNBC. Its success was both logical (an affordable product that cooked food quickly and could handle a variety of kitchen tasks) and a bit surprising, since its main benefit, pressure cooking, was not very popular in North America, where the method was considered outdated and prone to explosions. (History and branding experts might note that “immediate” evokes something you strongly desire, while “pressure” is exactly what you don't want.)
“I was not an early adopter,” says cookbook author and Times As food writer Melissa Clark told me recently: Times Clark has an old-fashioned pressure cooker (“I never use one”) and was skeptical at first, but she grew to love it. “It's really good at what it does,” she says. Her love was so great that she wrote an Instant Pot cookbook, “Dinner in an Instant,” which became the most popular of her more than 40 cookbooks.
So what will be the fate of the Instant Pot? How did something so beloved fall off the rails? Kitchen gadgets have a long history, but will they eventually fall out of fashion? Business schools may one day make a case study of one of the Instant Pot's weaknesses: that it was too good to be true. You paid $90 for an Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1, and it lasted a lifetime. It never broke, it never wore out, and it never introduced any major innovations that made you want to level up. It was a one-off for you as a customer. That may be satisfying, but it's hell for your profit and growth performance metrics. Clark also suggests that unlike the “cooking for beginners” promised by many cookware, the Instant Pot requires real effort. “It's a tool for real cooks,” Clark says. “It seems like magic, but it's not.” Never mind that Simon Rush's bestselling book, “The Ultimate Instant Pot Cookbook,” hints at this with its alluring pitch that the device will make your kitchen “effortless progress.” Clark expects the device will outlast a George Foreman grill but never ascend to microwave status — assuming Instant Brands can survive through restructuring (and $132 million in new funding).
In the meantime, clear out your countertops and buy some new stuff, like a mini waffle maker, an AI toaster oven, or a smart cutting board with a high-resolution screen (so you don't have to look away to see the recipe while dicing or slicing). What's the next item to put next to your carrot shaver? “Well,” Clark says carefully. “I think we've reached peak air fryer.”♦
