OTTAWA  — The Ottawa-founded company that sells the once-viral Instant Pot filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. and Canada on Tuesday. Here’s how it happened:

Not an instant success: In 2009, Robert Wang was a PhD-holding computer scientist who had done a stint at Nortel before joining two startups in succession. After he and his wife had struggled to make family meals while working, Wang turned his mind to creating an “intelligent cooking machine,” according to a 2019 profile in the Ottawa Citizen.

Months of work in his Ottawa home later, he had a device that could pressure cook, slow cook and fry, with a timer and sensors to monitor pressure and to shut down if food was burning. 

Boiling point: Wang’s shrewd move was an Amazon listing, and sifting reviews to see what features customers wanted. The company started a Facebook group (now with 3.2 million members), a YouTube channel, and Pinterest and Instagram pages.

With discounts, the company sold 215,000 pots during a Prime Day event in 2016 and another 300,000 in 2018 (it was a big seller in 2017, too, but Amazon didn’t release numbers).

Mighty merger: In 2019, Instant Brands merged with U.S.-based Corelle, a property of private equity firm Cornell Capital that owned Pyrex and CorningWare. 

Terms weren’t disclosed, but Wang became chief innovation officer and vice-chair of the combined entity, which kept the Instant Brands name.

A change in taste: Instant Brands’s filings blame “a series of uncontrollable macroeconomic events over the last three years” for the bankruptcy.

Consumers stuck at home in 2020 wanted more Instant Pots, but Instant Brands couldn’t get enough from its Asian manufacturers. In 2021, Asian ports were closed by COVID-19 and bad weather, and clogged U.S. ports couldn’t move the Instant Pots that got out. 

Then consumers “switched their preferences to other forms of cooking” and demand fell.

Instant Brands has tried to recapture the Instant Pot magic with sous vide sticks and air fryers but its earnings have tumbled. It told the bankruptcy court that in 2022, it generated an average of US$14.3 million in EBITDA a quarter; in the first three months of 2023, its EBITDA was US$5.9 million.

Meanwhile, it’s carrying more than US$512 million in debt, and interest rates have risen.

All this added up to “unprecedented liquidity challenges, which have accelerated dramatically over the past months,” it said.

What’s next: Instant Brands’s filings say it wants to keep paying its roughly 1,800 North American workers wages and benefits, honour its critical vendors’ bills and keep its utilities on. It has offers of new loans totalling US$257.5 million from existing creditors, replacing its current debt. The paperwork indicates the company wants to come back as a going concern.