Today Sansaire launched a Kickstarter campaign for their second generation sous vide machine, the Delta. Just hours into the launch of the campaign, the Delta -a Wi-Fi connected device that pairs with a newly cooking app – hit $70 thousand of its $100 thousand goal and has attracted 450 backers.
It’s an impressive start, but for Sansaire, a well known player in the nascent but fast growing sous vide category, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, the company’s first device raised over $800 thousand in 2013 and has since become one of the top selling sous vide circulators on Amazon.
This early success came on the heels of cofounder Scott Heimendinger’s viral success with his DIY sous vide project in 2012, which got picked up by Make magazine and helped make Heimendinger one of the cooking method’s earliest and most well known evangelists. While Heimendinger has since left to go to work full time at Modernist Cuisine as their technical director, in the last few years Sansaire has cemented a reputation as one of the go-to makers of affordable consumer sous vide circulators.
But despite the company’s early success on today’s Kickstarter, the reality is their new product will ship in a much different – and more competitive – market than when their first product shipped in 2014. Anova Culinary, who beat Sansaire to market with its first circulator, has since launched both Bluetooth and WiFi models and expects to ship 400 thousand units this year. Low cost sous vide hardware makers like Gourmia have entered the market, while new entrant ChefSteps is tapping into the large community it has built as one of the go-to destinations online for sous vide recipes and education to build demand for its Joule sous vide circulator.
Despite a more competitive market, Sansaire has built a loyal following in the sous vide market (as evidenced by the fast success of its Kickstarter campaign), and by shipping a connected sous vide machine, the company can now begin to explore the potential the comes from the fusion of precision cooking devices and cooking apps. The company is touting monitoring and notifications with the newly launched Sansaire app, and over time it’s possible they’ll add more guided cooking elements that could really make a hardware device like the Delta shine.
The real challenge for Sansaire lies beyond the Kickstarter campaign, where they will need to attract new converts to sous vide at a slightly higher price point than the Anova and ChefSteps circulators(the Delta’s retail price will be $249), while also facing competition from bigger players in small appliances who are eyeing entry into the sous vide market in 2017.
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