[Rezo]

Lots of people seem to be wondering why Instant Pot has become a hit while electronic pressure cookers have existed as a category for quite some time.

I personally think it's a great case of tipping points, networking effects and branding all working together.

The Instant Pot is a genuinely good product, so it didn't have a trouble finding early users. These people then produced recipes, books and videos not for pressure cookers, but for the Instant Pot specifically. There's 1600+ books for Instant Pot on Amazon, everything from how to cook Keto meals to Indian food. If you have a Breville Fast Slow, and I have a Cuisinart CPC-600 pressure cooker, the cooking times, settings and pressure levels aren't transferable between the two, and may produce quite different results. Hence the networking effect of everyone having the same brand and model of cooker, combined with the tipping point of reaching a certain mass of Instant Pot users, causing an explosion of recipes and guides, which again drives further adoption.

So why don't people create "Breville Fast Slow Pressure Cooker" recipes in the first place? I think it's because of the branding. The Instant Pot name itself is already fun and self-describing, and the marketing downplays the pressure cooking aspects. Pressure cooking has a negative association historically from a safety point of view. So while everyone tries to sell electronic pressure cookers, I think most people who buy this product aren't interested in pressure cookers at all, instead they're specifically getting an Instant Pot. And while technically they may be the same, the customers don't necessarily perceive it that way.

[ghaff]

>I think most people who buy this product aren't interested in pressure cookers at all, instead they're specifically getting an Instant Pot. And while technically they may be the same, the customers don't necessarily perceive it that way.

I don't know how deliberate it was but de-emphasizing its pressure cookerness was a smart move. A lot of people still associate "pressure cooker" with "explosions" and, even if they know intellectually they're not really dangerous, they'll still move on to the next item.

As others have said, the price is also quite reasonable--in fact, a lot of stovetop pressure cookers cost more. $100-ish is around the point where a lot of people will take a flyer on something and won't be too put out if it starts gathering dust after a few months.

[akgerber]

I have read an interview with the owner where he said he deliberately added & marketed a bunch of redundant safety features because Americans are afraid of pressure cookers.

[Bromskloss]

I wonder how one properly make a safety valve that works even when smeared by food, or prevent the smearing from happening. Should the valve be really large in cross-sectional area, so that the force a food clot would have to withstand becomes large?

[derekp7]

Pressure sensor that cuts off the electricity if pressure gets too high. No more electricity, no more heating, pressure drops. Another one I've seen on my mom's pressure cooker that she's had for probably 40 years or more, is a physical plug that will shoot out if the pressure gets too high and the release valve gets stuck. Of course, not sure what the potential damage from this plug would be (I've only ever seen it shoot into the pot when it was removed from the stove, and cooled too quickly). But better than the whole thing popping.

[akgerber]

The Instant Pot claims to have some sort of mechanism that will lower the cooking pot and break the seal in an overpressure situation: http://instantpot.us/benefits/safety-features/