Instant Pot is launching a Walmart-exclusive cooking blender

Instant Pot, the all-in-one pressure cooker that replaced many a crockpot and rice cooker in the kitchen, is now coming for your Vitamix. The Canadian company behind the cult favorite Instant Pot announced that it’s releasing a new product called the Instant Pot Ace 60 Cooking Blender, available exclusively through Walmart.

There are eight “Smart Built-in Programs,” four of which are your regular cold blending for making smoothies, almond / oat milk, ice cream, or crushing ice. The other four programs can heat food while blending, and they’re labeled for making soy milk, rice milk, purées, and soup. The blender is supposed to be made of a durable glass that can withstand extreme temperature changes, and can get hot enough to boil food while blending. The target audience for this seems to be millennials who don’t have enough counter space or time to transfer hot soups to blenders. It also comes with a mesh strainer bag to help us millennials make those alternative milks we’re so intent on making.

Given that the Instant Pot achieved its cult status largely through Amazon reviews (28,000 customer reviews as of right now), it seems like an unusual choice that the blender is a Walmart exclusive. At one point, more than 90 percent of Instant Pot’s sales came through Amazon, according to this New York Times article.

Besides its line of popular pressure-cookers, Instant Pot has two other cooking gadgets so far: a multi-cooker and a sous vide stick. Instant Pot doesn’t release sales numbers, so it’s not clear if the success of the Instant Pot pressure cooker has transferred over to its other accessories, and if it’ll transfer to the Ace cooking blender. Nonetheless, the Ace Blender will be available at Walmart September 23rd for $99.

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