Sous Vide startup Anova gets acquired by Electrolux
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's also less accurate temperature control because the thermocouple isn't submersed. It's a strip on the outside of a metal pan.
Rice cookers and crock pots don't have to heat up nearly as much water (which has a high specific heat capacity) as a sous vide machine big enough to handle a slab of ribs.
I am thinking of hacking the Kenwood kcook and add better temerature control to it, though :-) With an ESP8266 - boom. DIY connected kitchen device!
The difference with a commercial product is first and foremost safety. You've got high current electricity and moving parts in a high temperature environment, all underwater. The difference between what I made and something like the Anova is that the Anova isn't going to kill someone and also it will work reliably without the user needing to fix and tweak stuff (and that by itself is a feat, considering the environment an immersion cooker is designed to operate in). If I sold what I made as a product it would break and kill someone.
All that kind of engineering and also the important work of optimizing user experience is not something manufacturers of most rice cookers care about. It's not worth the extra engineering effort. That said, there are some pretty fancy high-end rice cookers that have pretty precise control and maybe these sort of features may creep in on those, but that sort of rice cooker is a whole different beast than the little Panasonic cooker that lives on my counter.
I draw an analogy with multimeters. I've got a cheapo multimeter with a safety rating that (dubiously) claims it's perfectly fine to jam the leads in an outlet. Would I? Hell no, it'd probably explode. Meanwhile I have a much more trustworth Fluke meter that cost literally 100x more that doesn't really do anything more than the cheapo but I'm not putting my life at risk probing an outlet.
You pay for that confidence, not only because there is a much larger engineering effort required to design and test a safe device, but also because you expect that they would be held accountable if their shit gets you killed. A legit safety rating is incurring a substantial liability.
The multimeter did explode, and it turned out that I was measuring voltage- and had the lead going to the amp section of the meter, so it kept showing 0 after its fuse blew. I figured the socket was dead, good thing I didn't stick my fingers in there.
The nice meter I have would probably blow a fuse if you connected it to the wall on the current setting, but it's a fast fuse so the rest of the meter would be fine. The fuses in really crappy meters are often quite slow though, so they will blow and cut the circuit but not before the meter gets fried.
There are different levels of "crappy" though. A lot of the cheap meters you can get nowadays are safe enough to jam in the wall, I'm not saying "oh you've gotta spend $1000 on a multimeter or you're gonna die." But if you're gonna probe high voltage you'd better get something nice. I have a $5 meter that claims it'd be good at 1000 V, but that is obviously a lie and would be suicide.
Most multimeters I've seen, cheapo or not, are rated to at least 1000V (sometimes 2-5kV). Now, as with all cheapo chinese electronics, you have to assume there is no safety margin on that so I wouldn't probe 1000V with such a meter. But 110 or 220V? Go for it. I'd be genuinely surprised if any common multimeter can't handle that (assuming it's operated properly, set on the right scale and such).
A fluke meter rated for 2kV can measure 2kV, because you know they have a decent safety margin there.
* Fluke 113 - $110 CAT IV 600V
* INNOVA 3320 - $25 CAT I 300V
* Mastech MS8229 - $50 This one is CAT II 1000V
* Extech EX330 - $50 CAT III 600V
* Brymen BM235 - $125 also CAT II 1000V
* Etekcity MSR-U1000 - $40, CAT III 1000V <- definite winner if it's true
All of those except the INNOVA would be ok to test on an outlet in terms of their safety rating, but most of the really cheap meters I found (<$15) are CAT I rated, meaning not safe to plug into the wall because they aren't rated for high power circuits. Sure you'll probably be OK, but I'd rather be confident.
My comment though was more along the lines of whether or not you trust their ratings. For example, I'm kind of suspicious of the rating on that Etekcity meter and I don't know if I'd be comfortable plugging it in to something really killer. My point was, if you want to really be confident you have to pay for the engineering and legal liability.
I have one. It actually works pretty well for a lot of things. The temp swing is a bit poor compared to other machines, about 2 degrees. But for the $120 I paid for it, it's pretty great.
https://www.amazon.com/Dorkfood-Sous-Vide-Temperature-Contro...
I've always dreamed of one day starting a company that made what was essentially the Instant Pot, and they did it first (and coincidentally also from my home town).
https://anovaculinary.com/anova-precision-cooker/specificati...
(We had an Anova, replaced it with a Joule and gave the Anova away)
I took my Anova with me to a rented condo in Hawaii, it's nice to be able to make quality food with minimal effort. Joule would be even easier to justify.
Anova is also much easier to clean than the Joule, it comes apart so easily and you just dry it out, I have one for over a year and no signs of scaling on the heating element because of that. The joule on the other hand can't be easily clean you can unscrew the bottom but then you need to use a brush and the heating element isn't fully exposed.
I have them both, and tbh I use the Anova considerably more, it's built better, it's built smarter, and the fact that I don't need to use a phone is a huge plus.
Sure the phone is great for the first week if you never used sous vide before (I cooked Sous Vide on an induction cooker with very coarse temp control and use a thermometer to know when I should turn it off and on for nearly 2 years before getting a proper setup) but once you know the temp it just becomes a hassle.
Joule has 1100 watts and the Anova (Wifi + BT) is 900 watts. So not sure what you mean by Anova having more power.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/shopping/joule-vs-anova-sous...
I agree with you on the ease of cleaning. I also have both and the Anova seems to be a bit easier to clean.
Id love to see a joule v2 with a display and a twistable top to set the temp.
The last time I tried to figure it out, they seemed to be a premium recipe/cooking classes website (bordering more on food porn, the videos seemed more artsy than useful to me) that is also pushing a sous vide machine. Am I right in assuming that the Joule is their pivot away from the online cooking lessons?
I hope he got a bonus at least.
The thing about all these products is, the fundamental technology isn't difficult. The challenge is just straightforward hardware product development and execution, the basic stuff that's hard for everyone to get right --- along with marketing and inventory and channel management.
PolyScience, on the other hand, has been doing serious equipment manufacturing for a long time.
As Sous Vide becomes more popular, all of the existing players are going to get murdered by cheap, Chinese generics and there's no real room for profit in the market. The devices are incredibly simple and easy to manufacture and there's no defensive moat around any of the technology.
There's the possibility of Anova branching out from SV into other related devices but it's unclear where it could head to justify the acquisition amount. They can either choose to pursue devices that are even more niche than SV (combi ovens, vacuum sealers, chamber vacuums, centrifuges, rotovaps) in the hopes that they become increasingly mainstream or they can go after more popular devices (microwaves, dishwashers, toaster ovens, blenders etc.) which are incredibly competitive fields filled with tough incumbents. Neither seems like an incredibly compelling choice or one I would stake an acquisition on.
I'm glad the team has gotten this far and has been instrumental in pushing SV more into the mainstream but I don't see many bright prospects for their future.
When I was planning to buy a sous vide machine, people had complaints about certain machines - e.g. that it only had a four hour timer after which it would switch off. The outcome might be the same, but the interfaces will be different. There are other features whereby they can differ (e.g. the clip).
> all of the existing players are going to get murdered by cheap, Chinese generics
If my sous vide machine doesn't work properly, e.g. it drops or cuts out the temperature, then I'll possibly get food poisoning. I'd prefer to trust a manufacturer who has a reputation to lose. Not to mention you have a mix of electricity, moving parts, heat and water - not something you want to play around with.
There's also the complexity of the app. I might want it to hit a certain temperature, then drop to a lower temperature for a specific amount of time. Good UX/UI costs money.
Also, 3 decades of SV experience has shown us that there isn't any complexity in practice to SV recipes. 99% of SV recipes are 2 numbers (temperature and time) and the other 1% is 3 numbers (cook temp, cook time and hold temp). There's no magic hyper complex SV recipe that we haven't discovered yet and not for lack of trying.
Factors that might affect the quality of the meal:
— How good is the thermostat? Is the temperature both precise and stable?
— How good is the circulation? Are there are any hotspots in the water?
— How easy is it to setup?
— How easy is it to clean?
— How safe is it? How well insulated are the components?
— How durable is it? Will it last me 6 months or 10 years?The non-food quality factors still allow for some degree of differentiation but they turn out to be not huge in practice. At the end of the day, price reigns supreme and it's a commodity market.
That is to say their producing 'Internet of Things' hardware and software for the kitchen that's more than just a gimmick? Their app has guides built in, so it's the beginning of an ecosystem, if they were able to push it hard enough?
Presumably it wouldn't be surprising to see Electrolux or the intact Anova brand bring this to other devices, though of course sous vide with its long cooking times and hands-off approach is probably amongst the most well suited to this approach.
You are right though, sous vide machines all do basically the same thing, and there really is no differentiation. I recently bought a Sansaire device, and it does the exact same job as the Polyscience and the massive professional circulators I've used in restaurants.
Sous Vide is a market closer to colanders than blenders. There's a couple of ways you can make a colander wrong but there isn't any appreciable way you can make a colander that drains water better than your competitors. For the most part, people buy the cheapest colander that isn't obviously terrible and leave it at that. Nobody has become a colander mogul and made their fortune on branded colanders because all of them work about the same.
And beside, if they wanted to compete on the pure brand side of the market, they bought the wrong company. Right now, Anova is the Samsung to Joule's Apple and they very much remain the market leader because they compete aggressively on price.
This is not a good comparison. There's a lot to be said of the reliability and quality of a sous-vide cooker, especially in a restaurant environment where if something goes wrong you get a lot of people sick instead of just yourself. The $120 Anova cookers are somewhat toy-like compared to the commercial-grade ones (see: PolyScience)
The only big tricky issue with SV is dealing with humidity and electronics but that's fairly simply fixed just by making the electronics low power enough to be passively cooled and completely sealing them as the Joule has done.
Honestly all the PolyScience gets you is capacity in water circulation and even then you're going to be limited more by the insulation capacity of the container.
Also, apparently Anova stuff is "connected in a meaningful way" - sounds familiar?
The apps aren't super useful in the first place and, even if they were, there's no meaningful way for the apps to provide lockin since you can never restrict a recipe to a single device.