5 ms·

Never underestimate the power of marketing and branding in creating profit over generic competitors. See blenders: Ninja, Vitamix.

by krapht 10y ago

MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
Or: Thermomix, can be yours for the low, low price of 1199 €. Widely successful product. Also, apparently Anova stuff is "connected in a meaningful way" - sounds familiar?
- shalmanese 10y ago
  All the current SV companies can see the writing on the wall and hope that they can avoid commodification via their proprietary app. Except that the problem is that Sous Vide is the ultimate open platform since each recipe only consists of two numbers, a temperature and a time. 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.
- Mikeb85 10y ago
  The Thermomix actually does (or did) something novel though. It does more than a Vitamix.
shalmanese 10y ago
Except that was marketing backed by genuine quality improvements. I don't doubt there will exist some high end sous vide machine that competes on looks and brand but it's destined to be a niche. 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.
- cr1895 10y ago
  >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. 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)
  - Terribledactyl 10y ago
    Unless you are cooking for >4 hours and within a few degrees of the pasteurization threshold, all you are compromising is the quality/consistency of the food. If you really need to ensure food safety, you're going to be using an external temp logger anyways. 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.
    - cr1895 10y ago
      Sure, but my comment was more a reaction to sous-vide cookers all being "as dumb as colanders" and essentially interchangeable.
  - shalmanese 10y ago
    The components inside a SV cooker are dead simple and it's very easy to make them reliable enough to not matter. The Anova isn't a toy at all, even at $120, reliability has been very good and many people report running them hours per day over multiple years. Even if an Anova only lasts 3 years and a Polyscience lasts 10, by the time the Anova dies, you can pick up the next gen model for half the price and still save money. 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.

Never underestimate the power of marketing and branding in creating profit over generic competitors. See blenders: Ninja, Vitamix.

by krapht 10y ago

Never underestimate the power of marketing and branding in creating profit over generic competitors. See blenders: Ninja, Vitamix.

MrBuddyCasino 10y ago

Or: Thermomix, can be yours for the low, low price of 1199 €. Widely successful product. Also, apparently Anova stuff is "connected in a meaningful way" - sounds familiar?

shalmanese 10y ago
All the current SV companies can see the writing on the wall and hope that they can avoid commodification via their proprietary app. Except that the problem is that Sous Vide is the ultimate open platform since each recipe only consists of two numbers, a temperature and a time. 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.
Mikeb85 10y ago
The Thermomix actually does (or did) something novel though. It does more than a Vitamix.

shalmanese 10y ago

Except that was marketing backed by genuine quality improvements. I don't doubt there will exist some high end sous vide machine that competes on looks and brand but it's destined to be a niche. 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.

cr1895 10y ago
>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. 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)
- Terribledactyl 10y ago
  Unless you are cooking for >4 hours and within a few degrees of the pasteurization threshold, all you are compromising is the quality/consistency of the food. If you really need to ensure food safety, you're going to be using an external temp logger anyways. 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.
  - cr1895 10y ago
    Sure, but my comment was more a reaction to sous-vide cookers all being "as dumb as colanders" and essentially interchangeable.
- shalmanese 10y ago
  The components inside a SV cooker are dead simple and it's very easy to make them reliable enough to not matter. The Anova isn't a toy at all, even at $120, reliability has been very good and many people report running them hours per day over multiple years. Even if an Anova only lasts 3 years and a Polyscience lasts 10, by the time the Anova dies, you can pick up the next gen model for half the price and still save money. 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.