The company that makes the Instant Pot and Pyrex cookware is filing for bankruptcy | CBC News

The company that makes kitchen staples like CorningWare, Pyrex and the Instant Pot has entered bankruptcy proceedings in the U.S. and Canada.

Illinois-based Instant Brands announced in a news release on Monday that it has “initiated a voluntary court-supervised Chapter 11 process” due to an unmanageable debt load.

“Tightening of credit terms and higher interest rates impacted our liquidity levels and made our capital structure unsustainable,” CEO Ben Gadbois said.

The company has $563 million US worth of debt on its books, according to Bloomberg, and doesn’t currently turn a profit. Ratings agency S&P downgraded the company last week and warned that “absent external funding or debt relief, we anticipate Instant Brands will face a liquidity shortfall over the near term.”

Rise and fall

The company’s current tough times are a marked reversal from the explosive growth the company was seeing a few years ago. Most of that came from the Instant Pot, which was invented by former Nortel engineer Robert Wang in 2009.

Prior to the pandemic, Wang’s company was selling hundreds of millions of dollars of the devices every year. It was one of the top sellers on Amazon’s annual Prime Day.

In 2019, Wang’s company merged with Illinois-based Corelle Brands, the owner of Pyrex, CorningWare, SnapWare and Corelle.

The company’s meteoric growth trajectory has slowed down in recent years. According to S&P, sales declined by almost 22 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, the seventh consecutive quarterly contraction.

“The company’s performance continues to deteriorate amid a weakening macro environment and lower consumer spending on discretionary categories,” S&P says.

Alongside the U.S. bankruptcy proceedings, Instant Brands “is commencing ancillary proceedings in Canada under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act,” the company said.

Broadly speaking, the CCAA is the Canadian equivalent of Chapter 11 of the U.S. bankruptcy code. Companies enter both processes when they are seeking the court’s help to protect them from their creditors while they try to come up with a way to restructure the business so it can continue to operate.