August 11, 2025 • 29 mins
What happened to the Instant Pot? It's come off its highs and changed dramatically. Its story is not one of overproduction or the whims of popularity. It's a more complicated story that involves investment finance and private equity.
Join us, Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough, authors of four Instant Pot books, including THE INSTANT POT BIBLE. We want to talk about what happened to this favorite kitchen appliance. Plus, a one-minute cooking tip on vinegar. And our favorites this week: head-on shrimp and pickled plums!
[01:07] Our one-minute cooking tip: Be forewarned that there's been a big change in distilled white vinegar.
[03:02] The rise and fall of the Instant Pot: its start, its wild popularity, and its move into private equity firms with all the do in their vulture capitalism.
[27:10] What’s making us happy in food this week: head-on shrimp and pickled plums!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
bruce (00:01):
Hey, I am bruce Weinstein and
mark (00:02):
this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Martin.
And I'm Mark Scarborough, and togetherwith Bruce, my husband, we have written
37 cookbooks, including the latestcold canning, small batch counting,
no pressure or steam canner needed.
Make two
bruce (00:14):
or three jars of what?
Apricot jams, strawberryjams, sour cherry preserves.
Ketchup, Kim cheese, chutney,and serves Pickles, relishes.
Mm-hmm.
Dessert sauces.
Hot bud Sauce.
mark (00:26):
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 thatbook in our one minute cooking tips,
something we discovered as writing it.
But what we really wanna talk aboutin this episode of the podcast is
the rise and fall of the Instant Potand what has happened to it since
(00:48):
we rode that wave, at least partway.
I wanna talk aboutwhat's happened to this.
Instant pot over the years and why ithas now fallen so far from its highs.
And then we'll tell you what'smaking us happy in food this week.
So let's get started.
bruce (01:08):
Our one minute cooking tip.
Make sure you read labels whenyou buy distilled white vinegar in
North America, because some of themajor North American distilled white
vinegar producers have decided tosave money by diluting that vinegar.
Not to the standard 5% acidity,but all the way down to 4% acidity.
(01:28):
That's right.
And that's a problem.
mark (01:30):
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 aboutwhite wine vinegar.
No, not about white slumming vinegar.
We're talking about the oldstandard distilled white vinegar.
Mm-hmm.
Much of it is now dropped to 4% acidity,and you need to read those labels.
(01:50):
If you are concerned about this, you do.
Why?
bruce (01:53):
Let's say you're making pickled cauliflower, right?
Because you're already dilutingthat vinegar with water to make
your brine right, so you'regonna dilute it one to one.
It's gonna be much less acidic thanit should be if you'd used 5% vinegar.
And then after about a week,your cauliflower is gonna start
to get mushy and degrade, andthe brines getting cloudy.
Not enough vinegar in there topreserve it for any length of time.
mark (02:18):
Right.
So the acidity has gone down.
So check the labels.
You can find out the acidity rateby reading the label carefully, and
then you'll note you have the rightkind in hand for what you need.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Before we get to the next part ofthis podcast, the rise and fall
of the Instant Pod, let me say, itwould be great if you could rate our
podcast or even give it a review.
If you can work to just simply writea simple review like Love the podcast,
(02:41):
dare I Ask, or things like that.
That is how you can keep usfresh in the analytics we are.
Hoarded.
That is the only kind of supportwe 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 therise and fall of the Instant Pot.
bruce (03:04):
I wanna start this segment off by explaining what an Instant pot is.
Okay.
Because a lot of people use thosewords instant pot, and we will
get to the fact that they actuallycall them ins instant pots.
But a lot of people use thosewords to mean they have an
electric pressure cooker.
They do.
And it's become this just sort ofgeneric word for pressure cooker,
(03:25):
electric pressure cookers like,
mark (03:26):
like in the South where where I grew up.
You call any carbonated beverageCoke, 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 wordyou use for a carbonated soda.
bruce (03:38):
But Instant Pot is a brand, and instant pot, as we said, is
Instant pot, not Instant pot.
mark (03:46):
I think that.
I think that people call the Insta Potand 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,
bruce (03:59):
and it is an electric appliance that does have a pressure cooker function.
Yep.
And we will get to all ofthat, but it has had quite.
A history, hasn't it?
Well,
mark (04:10):
yeah, and don't you think that part of the reason that what you're
saying is that people just referto any electric pressure cooker as
an instant pot simply speaks to therise, the crazy rise of this gadget.
Oh,
bruce (04:21):
it's
mark (04:21):
fantastic.
It took over the market.
They were fantastic.
They were all kinds of makersof electric pressure cookers.
Fero, the Spanish brand,
bruce (04:30):
even Cuisinart made one for years and all it did was Pressure cook.
mark (04:34):
Exactly.
Yeah.
People made other brands made electricpressure 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 aKleenex and that's a brand name.
bruce (04:50):
Yeah.
Part of why I think the InstantPot had that success were those
two words in its name, instant Pot.
Mm.
What a brilliant.
Brilliant marketing idea.
You have this electric pressurecooker, which cooks things faster
than any other appliance you may haveexcept stove top pressure cooker.
But it cooks things faster thanany electric appliance you have.
And you're calling it Instant Pot.
(05:11):
Who doesn't wanna make dinner in there?
Instant pot.
It's magic.
mark (05:14):
Right.
And we'll talk about that.
The difference between it's instantpot 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 wealso wanna talk about how this has now
fallen and this failure is, um, large.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, let me say that andaffected a lot of people.
It did.
There are some people, and we're notgonna name any names, but there are some
(05:36):
people who made a very decent careerby hitching themselves to instant POTS
and becoming social media influencersthrough instant pots, and ended up making.
Big box over their onlinepresence about the instant pop.
Yeah.
And those people are now high and dry.
bruce (05:56):
Yeah.
Because once the Instant Pot startedto fade out of popularity, they
had nothing else to hold onto.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, I will, I will say that Markand I wrote the Instant Pop Bible and
the Instant Pop Bible Next Generationand three other instant pop books.
So we did ride that wave too, but wedid not make it our entire identity.
Yeah.
It was yet.
(06:16):
Five more books in our libraryof now 37 books that we've
mark (06:20):
written.
And I think, I think I can tell youthis, and this is a bit behind the scenes
perhaps, but you know, writers live offboth the advances on their books and then
if their advances earn out, you sign.
Uh, you sell enough copies that whatthey paid you upfront is now made up and
now you start making money on each copy.
You know, you live off your royalties.
(06:40):
And we certainly started gettingroyalties off the Instant Pop
Bible, but we were not as crazypopular as some of the other books.
And there came this moment in which, oh,uh, all the big booksellers, independent
booksellers, Amazon, all of themreturned thousands of those books as the.
FAD crashed.
Mm-hmm.
(07:01):
And we were expecting a royalty checkat one point, and instead we ended
up with a statement that had negativenumbers because so many had been
returned, that those numbers werepulled off our statement, and I can
only imagine what some of those giantpeople felt at that moment as hundreds,
even hundreds of thousands of theirbooks were returned to the publisher.
(07:24):
Mm-hmm.
They went.
Deep in the hole.
bruce (07:26):
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, wewere already writing air fryer books
because saw the rise of the air fryer.
So we jumped on that kind of earlyon 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.
(07:47):
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.
mark (07:55):
Yeah.
Uh, telecommunications Giant.
bruce (07:57):
Mm-hmm.
And he created this.
Appliance with twopartners in Ottawa, Canada.
The partners left, he was joinedby two guys from Blackberry.
mark (08:05):
Again, tech guys.
These are all very entrepreneurial,techy kind of people
bruce (08:10):
and, and they had this love of food and they loved to
tinker around and so they came upwith what they called the first.
Six in one cooker, and I think this
mark (08:19):
is really important to just think about in terms of what happened with
the Instant Pot, because their initialidea for the Instant Pot was not that it
was a pressure cooker, but that it wasa 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 hadcome up with this six in one gadget.
(08:43):
There's a, there's a longstanding myth story structure.
I don't know in tech about the pivotthat you come up with something
and you have to be able to, inthe middle of its process, pivot.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And do something else with it.
Once it starts to become a success, andthis is in fact what they went through.
(09:03):
They went through a.
Pivot because they came out withthis thing that they were like, oh,
look at six things in one and you
bruce (09:08):
can get rid of all these other appliances and all you
need is this one appliance.
Mm-hmm.
And when they came out withit, 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 withRobert where we, oh my God.
I had a long conversation withhim and we did not jump on the
Instant Pot bandwagon for that book.
(09:29):
So when we decided to write the great bigPressure Cooker book, we knew there were
electric pressure cookers, just to say,
mark (09:35):
we're talking 20, we're writing it.
2014.
It's published in 2015.
Mm-hmm.
bruce (09:41):
We knew there were electric pressure cookers out there, and
we talked with our publisher andour editor and we decided the way
to make this a fabulous pressure.
Cooker book is in every recipe togive directions for how to cook
in a stove top pressure cooker.
And in an electric becausethey cook differently.
mark (09:58):
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 ofinstructions for stove top and electric,
bruce (10:09):
A stove top pressure cookers reach pressure of 15 PSI.
And if you know anything aboutscience, you know that as.
Pressure increases.
So does temperature so theyget higher pressure and higher
temperature inside the pot.
Correct.
So food will cook faster than it does inan electric pressure cooker because an
electric pressure cooker only reaches 12
mark (10:31):
Ps.
Right.
So just to be, just to bedumbly 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 thetemperature of the water above two 12
(10:52):
up into the 2 30, 2 40 Fahrenheit range.
Depending, you can get it higherthan that, depending on how
much pressure you put on it.
So the temperature ofthe water gets hotter.
Even as it boils in normalcircumstances, the minute water hits
two 12, it evaporates, it becomes gas.
It stops
bruce (11:09):
getting hotter at that point.
That's right.
Mm-hmm.
So,
mark (11:11):
and you know, yes, all the liquid, all the gas.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, it's coming out of the liquid orit'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 thebook again, Bruce said, we left the
Instant Pot out and we thought it wasa bit of a gimmick, and here's why.
So the first six in one cooker,what they thought was the
(11:32):
thing came out in about 2013.
It came out much hotter in Canada thanit came out in the United States, but it
was still hot even in the United States.
And we looked at it and by thetime 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 wasadding lots of buttons for meat
(11:54):
and grains and all this stuff.
All of these were for thepressure cooking setting.
It was blowing out intoall of these buttons.
And to be honest with you, and this isthe honest to God truth, those buttons
all cook at exactly the same pressure.
Mm-hmm.
They're put on there so that it alters thetiming slightly, but you can even change.
(12:17):
The timing with any of those buttons.
So in other words, you can cook a pieceof chicken with the meat button or the
grain button, or whatever button you want.
That's a pressure cooked button.
So long as you adjustthe timing appropriately,
bruce (12:31):
and our feeling is.
You need to follow the timings in yourrecipes, not use the timings built
into the machines and given that itwas 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 confusingin our great big pressure cooker book.
So here's the instructions for using.
(12:52):
An standard electric pressurecooker, which has pressure
settings or the stove top.
And then what we have to add athird set of instructions for
how to use the Instant Pot.
And to be honest, we're already nowon 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'soutdated before it's even published.
(13:13):
That's
mark (13:13):
right.
And so for the book, just to say, forthe great big brush cooker book, we
particularly got associated with theSpanish match manufacturer fa, because
they were making both stove top.
And electric pressure cookersand 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.
(13:34):
In 2016, the Instant Pot proved to be thenumber one bestseller on Amazon Prime Day.
And this is back in theday when Prime Day was.
A day instead of whatever it isnow, four months, but it was a day.
Mm-hmm.
And you know, you had this one dayinstant, uh, Amazon Prime Day and the
(13:55):
Instant Pot outsold everything elseby far, all across the Amazon site.
bruce (14:01):
So you put two and two together.
We had a very successful, great bigpressure cooker book, and Instant
Pot is now selling out everythingand rising Meteorically on Amazon.
So we went to a new publisher and the newpublisher said to us, I love what you did
with your great big pressure Cooker book.
I would like you to do the same
mark (14:21):
from three Sellout.
Uh, uh uh, it was threeSellout Moments on QVC.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
He loved that.
bruce (14:28):
He said, I think you could do the same thing for Instant Pot.
I would like you to write just aninstant pop book and let's go for it.
So we did.
Now, the thing about the instant popbible that we wrote is we had to take
into account all the different models.
'cause by now yeah, there'sthree or four different models.
Yeah, yeah.
(14:48):
And it starts to get a little complicated.
Robert w.
Even decided at one point he calledme 'cause we were talking a lot.
He would send me samples of the Instantbot right off the line in the Chinese
mark (15:00):
factories.
He would go down to the lines if hewas where they were being made, or
he would have them pulled right offthe line and he would literally throw
it in a box and mail it to Bruce.
And
bruce (15:10):
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,
mark (15:22):
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
bruce (15:28):
did.
And it was all about this next feature.
So he calls me and he says, so I'msending 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 Stovetop pressure cookers can get to 15 PSI
and the Instant pots can only get to12 PSI as can all maybe 13, 12 or 13.
(15:51):
Yes, as can all electric pressure cookers.
He said, I'm developing a new model ofInstant Pot that offers you the ability
to go all the way up to 15 PSI so it willcook as hot and as fast as a stove top.
mark (16:04):
And this is a huge thing.
And in fact, it.
It formed how we wrote the books becausein the end we wrote the instant pop books
so that there were recipes that couldbe used, um, with most instant pots.
And then the same recipe had tohave a separate set of timings for
this New Max model, which if youused Max, it had all these feet.
(16:27):
Robert Wang ever.
The tinkerer, an inventor, the theMax model automatically shut the.
Pressure valve.
Mm-hmm.
You didn't have to manually doanything with it, and it automatically
opened it up and as Bruce says, itcame up to the full 15 PSI that a
stove top pressure cooker will do.
(16:48):
By the way, just to say none ofthis, uh, comes up to the level
that pressure canners come up to.
No.
That's a whole nother, that'sa, a whole different thing.
These are pressure cookers.
Well,
bruce (16:57):
as a chef, I fell in love with that.
That 15 PSI thing that the Max could do.
Right.
And that's the, I wasso excited about that.
But what we didn't take into considerationwas, one, the Max machine was much
more expensive than the other.
So it was never going to sellQuite as well or become as popular.
mark (17:16):
Correct.
bruce (17:16):
And two.
People who don't have a maxmachine, were just confused by
those instructions in our recipes.
Well, yeah.
They were like, well, what's Max?
I don't know even whatyou're talking about.
mark (17:25):
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 manyinstant pots do you need?
I know people did end up with six, eight.
I would see social media postswith people who had a rack.
Of instant pots in their home,and they were so happy that their
spouse built them this rack for thepots and all that kind of stuff.
(17:47):
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 itpeaked and as it hit the top of its
hotness in 2019, instant, instant.
(18:07):
Brands, the Instant Pod company was soldto Chore Brands, and you may know Corll.
Dinnerware.
Yep.
Okay, so Carell Brands was one piece of alarger portfolio owned by an investment.
Banker, private equity firm,Carell Capital, they owned Corning.
(18:30):
They own Pyrex, and now theyown the instant brands and the,
they bought it for Billions.
Billions, I think they billion.
They spent a fortune, which isexactly as an entrepreneur, what
you want to happen to product.
He
bruce (18:41):
did a brilliant, brilliant move.
He built a company from scratch.
It became super popular.
He kept making new and excitingmodels that people kept buying.
And after he'd made somuch money making this.
This Instant Pod, he soldthe company for billions.
So
mark (18:57):
good for him.
Lemme say The Instant Podand the Instant Brands.
They made this huge successthrough social media.
They did almost notraditional advertising.
They literally became a viralphenomenon and he wrote it.
Out until he could sell it for as muchas one could imagine to Carell Brands,
(19:18):
which as I say, was owned by CarellCapital, and if you know anything
about private equity firms and how theywork, they took this brand, the Instant
brand, and they loaded it with debt.
They borrowed a ton of moneyagainst the brand name.
The brand could never pay back allthat money, and so they were then
able to put it into bankruptcy.
That is kind of the s.
(19:40):
Standard operating procedure of privateequity firms to find a popular brand.
Just pull as much debt ontoit 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 youborrowed on it is now yours.
That happened to it.
Over time, the company startedto degrade and then came the
(20:02):
big degrade, which was in 2023.
bruce (20:04):
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 brandscreate many more appliances.
Even the many varieties of instantpots, they did air fryers, right?
Uh, they did blenders, rotisserie,
mark (20:24):
didn't they do a rotisserie thing for one?
There was rot,
bruce (20:26):
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 keptsaying to ourselves is.
No.
They made all these things, whichis what made them a success and
made them attractive to Right.
Corral brands.
Correct.
(20:46):
And Carell said, oh, we could scrapeall that lovely money out of there
and become rich ourselves, which
mark (20:52):
is what they did.
That's exactly what they did.
And so they put it into bankruptcyin 2023, instant France was
acquired by Center Lane.
Partners, another private equity firm.
They actually just bought theAppliance 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 youthe facts of what happened.
Okay.
(21:12):
So Center Lane Partners owned aportfolio of various products.
They owned Pyrex, theyowned the old glass.
Company from Pennsylvania, anchor Hawking.
They owned Linux.
You made Linux from China andFlatware and that kind of stuff.
Um, now they own the InstantBrands because Center Lane
(21:37):
Partners owned both Pyrex and.
Anchor Hawking Center Lane Partnerscame under the eye of the US
Antitrust Department and theystarted to be investigated for
antitrust violations, not havinganything to do with the Instant Pot.
Mm-hmm.
With having everything to dowith the connection between
(21:59):
Pyrex and Anchor Hawking.
I believe they even put the factoryfor Anchor Hawking out of business.
They did.
They did Pennsylvania.
So here's the.
Brand did.
Here's what the firm, the privateequity 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 beganbringing out Linux, China, Linux,
(22:20):
flatware, and Instant Pots, as wellas even some glass square through
Anchor Hawking, all with the Trump.
Brand on them.
They did this so that they couldease their way out of regulation.
Essentially this was the new kind oflobbying, which is part flattery, that
(22:43):
in other words, we will put out Trumpbla branded appliances and this will
help ease us back out of regulation.
Again, I don't wanna getpolitical right in the
bruce (22:53):
hopes.
He gives us a free pass.
mark (22:54):
That's right.
But whatever you think about this movepolitically, and again, I don't care,
but whatever you think about it, thisfurther damaged the instant brand, right?
Because politics are so divisivein the United States that people
discovered that Instant Brands wasputting out a Trump branded Instant
(23:15):
Pot, and they all got away from it.
Whole, um, groups online andfire 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 campaignin order to get the US Justice Department
(23:35):
off their tails for antitrust violations.
bruce (23:38):
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.
mark (23:47):
And let's say that the Trump branded products was particularly
devastating to the originalaudience of the INS Instant Pod.
Mm-hmm.
The Canadian audience, which the salesjust fell off the hook at that point.
bruce (23:59):
So at the height.
Instant pot.
And when we were writing allthe books, I probably had about
25 instant pots in the house.
You did?
You did.
And I have, of course, given somany away and kept my favorite.
So what I have kept is a three quartinstant pot because it's the perfect
size for just like making potatoesfor mashed potatoes from Mark and me,
(24:19):
um, for making just a small amount ofbroth 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 quartis great 'cause you could make,
you know so much, use so muchin it as once and the 10 quart.
Here's what I love about the 10 quart.
(24:41):
What I loved about the Instabot in general was pasta.
You could cook pasta,spaghetti, zdi, rigatoni.
In your sauce, right?
You build a sauce, you put thepasta in, you put it on, and
five minutes later it's done.
In the 10 court, you could cookspaghetti without breaking it.
To fit the pot, it fit thewhole box of spaghetti.
And
mark (25:00):
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 functionto make chili after Bruce's
concert, stuff like that.
I rarely ever use the pressurecooker setting of them.
(25:20):
So that's the whole story, how this thingbecame 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, notbecause they began innovating too much,
but because they innovated it until theywere at the peak of their popularity.
(25:42):
It got sold and then it got sold.
Again, and then there came this politicalproblem and it really now has collapsed.
As I say, I've seen actually partiesonline with people selling on Facebook
marketplace, their instant potsfor a dollar to get rid of them.
This is all part of the politicalpolarization in the United States.
(26:03):
Ca Canada's distrust of the United States.
Yeah.
At this moment it's all part of what'shappening 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?
bruce (26:16):
Yeah, that I am not selling mine.
I don't care what'shappened to the company.
I love my three Insta Bots.
They are mine and no one can have
mark (26:23):
them.
Okay.
So there you go.
That's the rise and fallof the In Instant Bot.
So before we get to the final segment ofthis podcast, let me say that we have, uh,
great social media group available to you.
In fact, we have a TikTokchannel named Cooking with.
Bruce and Mark just the same name ashis 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.
(26:46):
Were making food for each other.
I think we're, uh, picklingcherry 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 actuallygoing 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
(27:08):
course, subscribing to this podcast.
Okay.
As is traditional, the final segment,what's making us happy in food this week?
bruce (27:17):
Head on shrimp.
Skewered and grilledmarinated 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 familyover for dinner 'cause he loves fish.
And we did a big what?
mark (27:36):
Nine of them came right?
Well the grandkids Two different.
Two different.
Our friends, their kids, twocouples that are their kids.
Plus three grandkids.
Mm-hmm.
bruce (27:46):
Including the birthday boy who wanted fish.
So I did a home mixed fishgrill, including head on
shrimp, which I got at Costco.
These were like, U nines means fewer thannine shrimp per pound, so they were giant.
I skewered them.
I marinated them in fish sauce and currypaste and lime juice and brown sugar.
(28:08):
They were so yummy.
So that made me happy.
mark (28:10):
It was really good.
Uh, I think what's made me happy infood this week are spiced pickled plums.
And if you go out toMelissa's, produce the organic.
Produce, uh, seller.
If you go down to their site onYouTube, you'll see Bruce and
I did, uh, an event for them.
We did a cooking event for themthat went on YouTube live and
now it's just living on YouTube.
(28:30):
So Melissa's produce and wemake these spiced pickled plums
from cold canning, our latestbook, 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 themlast night with all this.
Fish off the grill.
I'm not sure they exactly go withfish, but they were simply tasty.
(28:52):
They, with everything.
One person at the table claimed he wasfighting 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 thisjourney and thanks for being, um,
with us every step of this way.
bruce (29:07):
And if you're paying attention to social media, you know,
there's a lot of AI out there anda lot of videos that are totally.
Made up.
They're bots.
They're not real.
But when you go to watch Bruce andMark on cooking with Bruce and Mark on
our TikTok channel, on our Instagramchannel, on YouTube, on our Facebook
channel, you are always going to get us.
(29:28):
You are never gonna get ai.
That is our promise to you hereon cooking with Bruce and Mark.
Hey, I am bruce Weinstein and
mark (00:02):
this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Martin.
And I'm Mark Scarborough, and togetherwith Bruce, my husband, we have written
37 cookbooks, including the latestcold canning, small batch counting,
no pressure or steam canner needed.
Make two
bruce (00:14):
or three jars of what?
Apricot jams, strawberryjams, sour cherry preserves.
Ketchup, Kim cheese, chutney,and serves Pickles, relishes.
Mm-hmm.
Dessert sauces.
Hot bud Sauce.
mark (00:26):
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 thatbook in our one minute cooking tips,
something we discovered as writing it.
But what we really wanna talk aboutin this episode of the podcast is
the rise and fall of the Instant Potand what has happened to it since
(00:48):
we rode that wave, at least partway.
I wanna talk aboutwhat's happened to this.
Instant pot over the years and why ithas now fallen so far from its highs.
And then we'll tell you what'smaking us happy in food this week.
So let's get started.
bruce (01:08):
Our one minute cooking tip.
Make sure you read labels whenyou buy distilled white vinegar in
North America, because some of themajor North American distilled white
vinegar producers have decided tosave money by diluting that vinegar.
Not to the standard 5% acidity,but all the way down to 4% acidity.
(01:28):
That's right.
And that's a problem.
mark (01:30):
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 aboutwhite wine vinegar.
No, not about white slumming vinegar.
We're talking about the oldstandard distilled white vinegar.
Mm-hmm.
Much of it is now dropped to 4% acidity,and you need to read those labels.
(01:50):
If you are concerned about this, you do.
Why?
bruce (01:53):
Let's say you're making pickled cauliflower, right?
Because you're already dilutingthat vinegar with water to make
your brine right, so you'regonna dilute it one to one.
It's gonna be much less acidic thanit should be if you'd used 5% vinegar.
And then after about a week,your cauliflower is gonna start
to get mushy and degrade, andthe brines getting cloudy.
Not enough vinegar in there topreserve it for any length of time.
mark (02:18):
Right.
So the acidity has gone down.
So check the labels.
You can find out the acidity rateby reading the label carefully, and
then you'll note you have the rightkind in hand for what you need.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Before we get to the next part ofthis podcast, the rise and fall
of the Instant Pod, let me say, itwould be great if you could rate our
podcast or even give it a review.
If you can work to just simply writea simple review like Love the podcast,
(02:41):
dare I Ask, or things like that.
That is how you can keep usfresh in the analytics we are.
Hoarded.
That is the only kind of supportwe 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 therise and fall of the Instant Pot.
bruce (03:04):
I wanna start this segment off by explaining what an Instant pot is.
Okay.
Because a lot of people use thosewords instant pot, and we will
get to the fact that they actuallycall them ins instant pots.
But a lot of people use thosewords to mean they have an
electric pressure cooker.
They do.
And it's become this just sort ofgeneric word for pressure cooker,
(03:25):
electric pressure cookers like,
mark (03:26):
like in the South where where I grew up.
You call any carbonated beverageCoke, 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 wordyou use for a carbonated soda.
bruce (03:38):
But Instant Pot is a brand, and instant pot, as we said, is
Instant pot, not Instant pot.
mark (03:46):
I think that.
I think that people call the Insta Potand 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,
bruce (03:59):
and it is an electric appliance that does have a pressure cooker function.
Yep.
And we will get to all ofthat, but it has had quite.
A history, hasn't it?
Well,
mark (04:10):
yeah, and don't you think that part of the reason that what you're
saying is that people just referto any electric pressure cooker as
an instant pot simply speaks to therise, the crazy rise of this gadget.
Oh,
bruce (04:21):
it's
mark (04:21):
fantastic.
It took over the market.
They were fantastic.
They were all kinds of makersof electric pressure cookers.
Fero, the Spanish brand,
bruce (04:30):
even Cuisinart made one for years and all it did was Pressure cook.
mark (04:34):
Exactly.
Yeah.
People made other brands made electricpressure 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 aKleenex and that's a brand name.
bruce (04:50):
Yeah.
Part of why I think the InstantPot had that success were those
two words in its name, instant Pot.
Mm.
What a brilliant.
Brilliant marketing idea.
You have this electric pressurecooker, which cooks things faster
than any other appliance you may haveexcept stove top pressure cooker.
But it cooks things faster thanany electric appliance you have.
And you're calling it Instant Pot.
(05:11):
Who doesn't wanna make dinner in there?
Instant pot.
It's magic.
mark (05:14):
Right.
And we'll talk about that.
The difference between it's instantpot 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 wealso wanna talk about how this has now
fallen and this failure is, um, large.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, let me say that andaffected a lot of people.
It did.
There are some people, and we're notgonna name any names, but there are some
(05:36):
people who made a very decent careerby hitching themselves to instant POTS
and becoming social media influencersthrough instant pots, and ended up making.
Big box over their onlinepresence about the instant pop.
Yeah.
And those people are now high and dry.
bruce (05:56):
Yeah.
Because once the Instant Pot startedto fade out of popularity, they
had nothing else to hold onto.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, I will, I will say that Markand I wrote the Instant Pop Bible and
the Instant Pop Bible Next Generationand three other instant pop books.
So we did ride that wave too, but wedid not make it our entire identity.
Yeah.
It was yet.
(06:16):
Five more books in our libraryof now 37 books that we've
mark (06:20):
written.
And I think, I think I can tell youthis, and this is a bit behind the scenes
perhaps, but you know, writers live offboth the advances on their books and then
if their advances earn out, you sign.
Uh, you sell enough copies that whatthey paid you upfront is now made up and
now you start making money on each copy.
You know, you live off your royalties.
(06:40):
And we certainly started gettingroyalties off the Instant Pop
Bible, but we were not as crazypopular as some of the other books.
And there came this moment in which, oh,uh, all the big booksellers, independent
booksellers, Amazon, all of themreturned thousands of those books as the.
FAD crashed.
Mm-hmm.
(07:01):
And we were expecting a royalty checkat one point, and instead we ended
up with a statement that had negativenumbers because so many had been
returned, that those numbers werepulled off our statement, and I can
only imagine what some of those giantpeople felt at that moment as hundreds,
even hundreds of thousands of theirbooks were returned to the publisher.
(07:24):
Mm-hmm.
They went.
Deep in the hole.
bruce (07:26):
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, wewere already writing air fryer books
because saw the rise of the air fryer.
So we jumped on that kind of earlyon 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.
(07:47):
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.
mark (07:55):
Yeah.
Uh, telecommunications Giant.
bruce (07:57):
Mm-hmm.
And he created this.
Appliance with twopartners in Ottawa, Canada.
The partners left, he was joinedby two guys from Blackberry.
mark (08:05):
Again, tech guys.
These are all very entrepreneurial,techy kind of people
bruce (08:10):
and, and they had this love of food and they loved to
tinker around and so they came upwith what they called the first.
Six in one cooker, and I think this
mark (08:19):
is really important to just think about in terms of what happened with
the Instant Pot, because their initialidea for the Instant Pot was not that it
was a pressure cooker, but that it wasa 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 hadcome up with this six in one gadget.
(08:43):
There's a, there's a longstanding myth story structure.
I don't know in tech about the pivotthat you come up with something
and you have to be able to, inthe middle of its process, pivot.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And do something else with it.
Once it starts to become a success, andthis is in fact what they went through.
(09:03):
They went through a.
Pivot because they came out withthis thing that they were like, oh,
look at six things in one and you
bruce (09:08):
can get rid of all these other appliances and all you
need is this one appliance.
Mm-hmm.
And when they came out withit, 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 withRobert where we, oh my God.
I had a long conversation withhim and we did not jump on the
Instant Pot bandwagon for that book.
(09:29):
So when we decided to write the great bigPressure Cooker book, we knew there were
electric pressure cookers, just to say,
mark (09:35):
we're talking 20, we're writing it.
2014.
It's published in 2015.
Mm-hmm.
bruce (09:41):
We knew there were electric pressure cookers out there, and
we talked with our publisher andour editor and we decided the way
to make this a fabulous pressure.
Cooker book is in every recipe togive directions for how to cook
in a stove top pressure cooker.
And in an electric becausethey cook differently.
mark (09:58):
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 ofinstructions for stove top and electric,
bruce (10:09):
A stove top pressure cookers reach pressure of 15 PSI.
And if you know anything aboutscience, you know that as.
Pressure increases.
So does temperature so theyget higher pressure and higher
temperature inside the pot.
Correct.
So food will cook faster than it does inan electric pressure cooker because an
electric pressure cooker only reaches 12
mark (10:31):
Ps.
Right.
So just to be, just to bedumbly 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 thetemperature of the water above two 12
(10:52):
up into the 2 30, 2 40 Fahrenheit range.
Depending, you can get it higherthan that, depending on how
much pressure you put on it.
So the temperature ofthe water gets hotter.
Even as it boils in normalcircumstances, the minute water hits
two 12, it evaporates, it becomes gas.
It stops
bruce (11:09):
getting hotter at that point.
That's right.
Mm-hmm.
So,
mark (11:11):
and you know, yes, all the liquid, all the gas.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, it's coming out of the liquid orit'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 thebook again, Bruce said, we left the
Instant Pot out and we thought it wasa bit of a gimmick, and here's why.
So the first six in one cooker,what they thought was the
(11:32):
thing came out in about 2013.
It came out much hotter in Canada thanit came out in the United States, but it
was still hot even in the United States.
And we looked at it and by thetime 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 wasadding lots of buttons for meat
(11:54):
and grains and all this stuff.
All of these were for thepressure cooking setting.
It was blowing out intoall of these buttons.
And to be honest with you, and this isthe honest to God truth, those buttons
all cook at exactly the same pressure.
Mm-hmm.
They're put on there so that it alters thetiming slightly, but you can even change.
(12:17):
The timing with any of those buttons.
So in other words, you can cook a pieceof chicken with the meat button or the
grain button, or whatever button you want.
That's a pressure cooked button.
So long as you adjustthe timing appropriately,
bruce (12:31):
and our feeling is.
You need to follow the timings in yourrecipes, not use the timings built
into the machines and given that itwas 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 confusingin our great big pressure cooker book.
So here's the instructions for using.
(12:52):
An standard electric pressurecooker, which has pressure
settings or the stove top.
And then what we have to add athird set of instructions for
how to use the Instant Pot.
And to be honest, we're already nowon 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'soutdated before it's even published.
(13:13):
That's
mark (13:13):
right.
And so for the book, just to say, forthe great big brush cooker book, we
particularly got associated with theSpanish match manufacturer fa, because
they were making both stove top.
And electric pressure cookersand 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.
(13:34):
In 2016, the Instant Pot proved to be thenumber one bestseller on Amazon Prime Day.
And this is back in theday when Prime Day was.
A day instead of whatever it isnow, four months, but it was a day.
Mm-hmm.
And you know, you had this one dayinstant, uh, Amazon Prime Day and the
(13:55):
Instant Pot outsold everything elseby far, all across the Amazon site.
bruce (14:01):
So you put two and two together.
We had a very successful, great bigpressure cooker book, and Instant
Pot is now selling out everythingand rising Meteorically on Amazon.
So we went to a new publisher and the newpublisher said to us, I love what you did
with your great big pressure Cooker book.
I would like you to do the same
mark (14:21):
from three Sellout.
Uh, uh uh, it was threeSellout Moments on QVC.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
He loved that.
bruce (14:28):
He said, I think you could do the same thing for Instant Pot.
I would like you to write just aninstant pop book and let's go for it.
So we did.
Now, the thing about the instant popbible that we wrote is we had to take
into account all the different models.
'cause by now yeah, there'sthree or four different models.
Yeah, yeah.
(14:48):
And it starts to get a little complicated.
Robert w.
Even decided at one point he calledme 'cause we were talking a lot.
He would send me samples of the Instantbot right off the line in the Chinese
mark (15:00):
factories.
He would go down to the lines if hewas where they were being made, or
he would have them pulled right offthe line and he would literally throw
it in a box and mail it to Bruce.
And
bruce (15:10):
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,
mark (15:22):
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
bruce (15:28):
did.
And it was all about this next feature.
So he calls me and he says, so I'msending 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 Stovetop pressure cookers can get to 15 PSI
and the Instant pots can only get to12 PSI as can all maybe 13, 12 or 13.
(15:51):
Yes, as can all electric pressure cookers.
He said, I'm developing a new model ofInstant Pot that offers you the ability
to go all the way up to 15 PSI so it willcook as hot and as fast as a stove top.
mark (16:04):
And this is a huge thing.
And in fact, it.
It formed how we wrote the books becausein the end we wrote the instant pop books
so that there were recipes that couldbe used, um, with most instant pots.
And then the same recipe had tohave a separate set of timings for
this New Max model, which if youused Max, it had all these feet.
(16:27):
Robert Wang ever.
The tinkerer, an inventor, the theMax model automatically shut the.
Pressure valve.
Mm-hmm.
You didn't have to manually doanything with it, and it automatically
opened it up and as Bruce says, itcame up to the full 15 PSI that a
stove top pressure cooker will do.
(16:48):
By the way, just to say none ofthis, uh, comes up to the level
that pressure canners come up to.
No.
That's a whole nother, that'sa, a whole different thing.
These are pressure cookers.
Well,
bruce (16:57):
as a chef, I fell in love with that.
That 15 PSI thing that the Max could do.
Right.
And that's the, I wasso excited about that.
But what we didn't take into considerationwas, one, the Max machine was much
more expensive than the other.
So it was never going to sellQuite as well or become as popular.
mark (17:16):
Correct.
bruce (17:16):
And two.
People who don't have a maxmachine, were just confused by
those instructions in our recipes.
Well, yeah.
They were like, well, what's Max?
I don't know even whatyou're talking about.
mark (17:25):
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 manyinstant pots do you need?
I know people did end up with six, eight.
I would see social media postswith people who had a rack.
Of instant pots in their home,and they were so happy that their
spouse built them this rack for thepots and all that kind of stuff.
(17:47):
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 itpeaked and as it hit the top of its
hotness in 2019, instant, instant.
(18:07):
Brands, the Instant Pod company was soldto Chore Brands, and you may know Corll.
Dinnerware.
Yep.
Okay, so Carell Brands was one piece of alarger portfolio owned by an investment.
Banker, private equity firm,Carell Capital, they owned Corning.
(18:30):
They own Pyrex, and now theyown the instant brands and the,
they bought it for Billions.
Billions, I think they billion.
They spent a fortune, which isexactly as an entrepreneur, what
you want to happen to product.
He
bruce (18:41):
did a brilliant, brilliant move.
He built a company from scratch.
It became super popular.
He kept making new and excitingmodels that people kept buying.
And after he'd made somuch money making this.
This Instant Pod, he soldthe company for billions.
So
mark (18:57):
good for him.
Lemme say The Instant Podand the Instant Brands.
They made this huge successthrough social media.
They did almost notraditional advertising.
They literally became a viralphenomenon and he wrote it.
Out until he could sell it for as muchas one could imagine to Carell Brands,
(19:18):
which as I say, was owned by CarellCapital, and if you know anything
about private equity firms and how theywork, they took this brand, the Instant
brand, and they loaded it with debt.
They borrowed a ton of moneyagainst the brand name.
The brand could never pay back allthat money, and so they were then
able to put it into bankruptcy.
That is kind of the s.
(19:40):
Standard operating procedure of privateequity firms to find a popular brand.
Just pull as much debt ontoit 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 youborrowed on it is now yours.
That happened to it.
Over time, the company startedto degrade and then came the
(20:02):
big degrade, which was in 2023.
bruce (20:04):
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 brandscreate many more appliances.
Even the many varieties of instantpots, they did air fryers, right?
Uh, they did blenders, rotisserie,
mark (20:24):
didn't they do a rotisserie thing for one?
There was rot,
bruce (20:26):
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 keptsaying to ourselves is.
No.
They made all these things, whichis what made them a success and
made them attractive to Right.
Corral brands.
Correct.
(20:46):
And Carell said, oh, we could scrapeall that lovely money out of there
and become rich ourselves, which
mark (20:52):
is what they did.
That's exactly what they did.
And so they put it into bankruptcyin 2023, instant France was
acquired by Center Lane.
Partners, another private equity firm.
They actually just bought theAppliance 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 youthe facts of what happened.
Okay.
(21:12):
So Center Lane Partners owned aportfolio of various products.
They owned Pyrex, theyowned the old glass.
Company from Pennsylvania, anchor Hawking.
They owned Linux.
You made Linux from China andFlatware and that kind of stuff.
Um, now they own the InstantBrands because Center Lane
(21:37):
Partners owned both Pyrex and.
Anchor Hawking Center Lane Partnerscame under the eye of the US
Antitrust Department and theystarted to be investigated for
antitrust violations, not havinganything to do with the Instant Pot.
Mm-hmm.
With having everything to dowith the connection between
(21:59):
Pyrex and Anchor Hawking.
I believe they even put the factoryfor Anchor Hawking out of business.
They did.
They did Pennsylvania.
So here's the.
Brand did.
Here's what the firm, the privateequity 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 beganbringing out Linux, China, Linux,
(22:20):
flatware, and Instant Pots, as wellas even some glass square through
Anchor Hawking, all with the Trump.
Brand on them.
They did this so that they couldease their way out of regulation.
Essentially this was the new kind oflobbying, which is part flattery, that
(22:43):
in other words, we will put out Trumpbla branded appliances and this will
help ease us back out of regulation.
Again, I don't wanna getpolitical right in the
bruce (22:53):
hopes.
He gives us a free pass.
mark (22:54):
That's right.
But whatever you think about this movepolitically, and again, I don't care,
but whatever you think about it, thisfurther damaged the instant brand, right?
Because politics are so divisivein the United States that people
discovered that Instant Brands wasputting out a Trump branded Instant
(23:15):
Pot, and they all got away from it.
Whole, um, groups online andfire 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 campaignin order to get the US Justice Department
(23:35):
off their tails for antitrust violations.
bruce (23:38):
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.
mark (23:47):
And let's say that the Trump branded products was particularly
devastating to the originalaudience of the INS Instant Pod.
Mm-hmm.
The Canadian audience, which the salesjust fell off the hook at that point.
bruce (23:59):
So at the height.
Instant pot.
And when we were writing allthe books, I probably had about
25 instant pots in the house.
You did?
You did.
And I have, of course, given somany away and kept my favorite.
So what I have kept is a three quartinstant pot because it's the perfect
size for just like making potatoesfor mashed potatoes from Mark and me,
(24:19):
um, for making just a small amount ofbroth 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 quartis great 'cause you could make,
you know so much, use so muchin it as once and the 10 quart.
Here's what I love about the 10 quart.
(24:41):
What I loved about the Instabot in general was pasta.
You could cook pasta,spaghetti, zdi, rigatoni.
In your sauce, right?
You build a sauce, you put thepasta in, you put it on, and
five minutes later it's done.
In the 10 court, you could cookspaghetti without breaking it.
To fit the pot, it fit thewhole box of spaghetti.
And
mark (25:00):
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 functionto make chili after Bruce's
concert, stuff like that.
I rarely ever use the pressurecooker setting of them.
(25:20):
So that's the whole story, how this thingbecame 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, notbecause they began innovating too much,
but because they innovated it until theywere at the peak of their popularity.
(25:42):
It got sold and then it got sold.
Again, and then there came this politicalproblem and it really now has collapsed.
As I say, I've seen actually partiesonline with people selling on Facebook
marketplace, their instant potsfor a dollar to get rid of them.
This is all part of the politicalpolarization in the United States.
(26:03):
Ca Canada's distrust of the United States.
Yeah.
At this moment it's all part of what'shappening 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?
bruce (26:16):
Yeah, that I am not selling mine.
I don't care what'shappened to the company.
I love my three Insta Bots.
They are mine and no one can have
mark (26:23):
them.
Okay.
So there you go.
That's the rise and fallof the In Instant Bot.
So before we get to the final segment ofthis podcast, let me say that we have, uh,
great social media group available to you.
In fact, we have a TikTokchannel named Cooking with.
Bruce and Mark just the same name ashis 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.
(26:46):
Were making food for each other.
I think we're, uh, picklingcherry 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 actuallygoing 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
(27:08):
course, subscribing to this podcast.
Okay.
As is traditional, the final segment,what's making us happy in food this week?
bruce (27:17):
Head on shrimp.
Skewered and grilledmarinated 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 familyover for dinner 'cause he loves fish.
And we did a big what?
mark (27:36):
Nine of them came right?
Well the grandkids Two different.
Two different.
Our friends, their kids, twocouples that are their kids.
Plus three grandkids.
Mm-hmm.
bruce (27:46):
Including the birthday boy who wanted fish.
So I did a home mixed fishgrill, including head on
shrimp, which I got at Costco.
These were like, U nines means fewer thannine shrimp per pound, so they were giant.
I skewered them.
I marinated them in fish sauce and currypaste and lime juice and brown sugar.
(28:08):
They were so yummy.
So that made me happy.
mark (28:10):
It was really good.
Uh, I think what's made me happy infood this week are spiced pickled plums.
And if you go out toMelissa's, produce the organic.
Produce, uh, seller.
If you go down to their site onYouTube, you'll see Bruce and
I did, uh, an event for them.
We did a cooking event for themthat went on YouTube live and
now it's just living on YouTube.
(28:30):
So Melissa's produce and wemake these spiced pickled plums
from cold canning, our latestbook, 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 themlast night with all this.
Fish off the grill.
I'm not sure they exactly go withfish, but they were simply tasty.
(28:52):
They, with everything.
One person at the table claimed he wasfighting 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 thisjourney and thanks for being, um,
with us every step of this way.
bruce (29:07):
And if you're paying attention to social media, you know,
there's a lot of AI out there anda lot of videos that are totally.
Made up.
They're bots.
They're not real.
But when you go to watch Bruce andMark on cooking with Bruce and Mark on
our TikTok channel, on our Instagramchannel, on YouTube, on our Facebook
channel, you are always going to get us.
(29:28):
You are never gonna get ai.
That is our promise to you hereon cooking with Bruce and Mark.
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