Sous Vide Supreme
The long-awaited announcement of what MD and I have been working on for the past couple of years is at hand. We have developed (along with a team of engineers, designers, manufacturers, business people and a host of others) the first stand-alone sous vide unit made specifically for the home kitchen. It’s called the Sous Vide Supreme and is pictured at left, getting ready to ship. The Sous Vide Supreme is the first new category of kitchen appliance since the microwave, so we’re incredibly excited about our role in what we think is a world-changing event. At least world changing in the same way the microwave was world changing.
For those of you unfamiliar with sous vide, it is a French term meaning ‘under vacuum’ and refers to a method of cooking in which vacuum-packed foods are cooked in a water bath creating a taste and flavor that can’t be replicated any other way. Though many of you may never have heard of the term ‘sous vide,’ it’s a good bet that you have tasted food prepared using the ‘sous vide’ method, especially if you have eaten at a fine restaurant.
Why on earth would two physicians who made their reputations caring for overweight patients and writing books about diet and nutrition veer off in the direction of manufacturing a kitchen appliance? As is always said in situations such as this one, it’s a long story. But not really that long, so I’ll tell it.
A couple of years ago I was trolling through the internet looking for something – I don’t remember what – and I came upon an article about the sous vide method of cooking. I read about it and did a little more research. Once I understood the concept, it all made perfect sense to me, so I did what I always do in cooking situations: I dragooned MD into doing all the work. I did help a little, but she was the real technician in putting our first sous vide contraption together.
So you’ll understand how sous vide works, I’ll digress a little from the story of our development of the Sous Vide Supreme to explain.
Say, for instance, you want to cook a perfect medium rare steak. You throw it on a very hot grill (or skillet) and try to guess the amount of time it will take for the extreme heat to penetrate the steak until it raises the temperature in middle of the steak to 134 degrees F. Often you miss and either under cook or (more commonly) overcook the steak. You can be more precise if you use a meat thermometer and pull the steak off the grill when the temperature reaches 134 degrees. This meat-thermometer technique is obviously a more accurate way to ensure the perfect medium rare steak, but it has its drawbacks. If you pull the steak off the grill when the center is at 134 F, the steak continues to cook and will end up more well done than medium rare. If you pull it off at, say, 128 F, you are playing the guessing game again, hoping that it will cook to the 134 F on its own.
And we’re not even talking here about the problems you run into if you are cooking several steaks of differing thicknesses, a situation that multiplies the probability of having a not-quite-right outcome – at least with some of the steaks.
If you use either of the above methods precisely, you end up with a perfect medium rare steak…right in the middle. The center of the steak is medium rare, but it gets more and more well done as it gets closer to the surface. You have what looks kind of like a target with the perfect medium rare center being the bulls eye with the rest of the target being progressively more well done as it gets nearer the edges.
Sous vide solves this problem. You season your steaks however you like them seasoned, then you put them in vacuum bags and seal them. (You don’t have to have an expensive machine for this. You can find vacuum bags and pumps for just a few dollars at most grocery stores.) You then put the seasoned, sealed steaks into a sous vide water bath set for 134 F and walk away. You can leave them in for an hour or eight hours – the time doesn’t really matter that much because as soon as the steaks reach 134 degrees throughout, they are perfectly medium rare and they don’t get any more well done beyond that point. So if you’re having a dinner party and your steaks are in a sous vide cooker awaiting the meal and the pre-dinner chit chat runs a half hour (or an hour or two hours) over, it doesn’t matter. You take the steaks out, remove them from the bag, finish them off for about 30 seconds, and you’re finished and have perfect medium rare steaks. And it doesn’t matter if some of your guests want thick fillets while others want thinner sirloins and yet others want rib eyes – they all come out perfect at the same time.
Sous vide is the perfect method for cooking tougher cuts of meat. Grass fed beef, though tasty, isn’t always the most tender of selections. If, however, you put a couple of grass-fed beef steaks in a sous vide bath before you go to work, by the time you get home, they are as tender as a mother’s heart while still retaining all their taste. MD blogged about flank steak cooked sous vide a while back. You can cook flank steak, which is really tasty but tough, using the sous vide method and have a meat that is as tender as filet but with all the taste of the flank steak and best of all, not overcooked.
Here is a link to a full-page Wall Street Journal article from about a year and a half ago that describes the sous vide process and has a pretty good video showing how it works to cook a steak.
But it’s not just for steak. You can use the Sous Vide Supreme to cook any kind of meat and vegetables. And can even use it to make ice cream base, béarnaise sauce, creme anglaise and anything that requires a precise temperature to cook properly. Vegetables cooked sous vide are out of this world. For instance, if you cook beets the traditional way by boiling them, you’re left with a lot of beet-colored water in the pan after you’ve removed the beets. This beet-colored fluid contains flavonoids, carotenoids and other beneficial nutrients that you would prefer not to lose. If you vacuum seal the beets and cook them sous vide at 185 F, you end up with beets that are unlike any beets you’ve tasted before. They look the same, but taste much more beet-y, because they have retained all the nutritious fluid that you previously threw down the drain after boiling. The beets are tastier, have a better consistency and are more nutritious than beets cooked any other way. It works the same with all veggies.
When MD built our first home-made sous vide contraption on our stove, she used a stock pot that she had to put up on a scaffold she built out of odds and ends she rounded up from the kitchen. She had to get the pot above the flame because even at its lowest setting, the fire was hot enough to simmer water, which meant that the temperature was 212 F, way, way too hot for sous vide. She had to get the bottom of the pot high enough, so that the temperature in the water in the pot was around 140 F (at that point, we thought 140 was the temperature required for a perfect medium rare steak). It was no mean feat to do so. She had to keep a candy thermometer in the pot and keep adding little bits of cold water and even ice to keep the water at 140 F. (I now wish that I had photographed this early contraption, but, alas, I didn’t, so you’ll just have to imagine it.) After keeping a couple of vacuum-sealed steaks submerged at roughly 140 F for a couple of hours (which required her constant attention), MD pulled them out, finished them off on the grill for a few seconds, and we cut into them. We learned a couple of things. First, 140 F is too hot for medium rare, and, second, finishing is an important part of the process.
MD with my invaluable technical advice fiddled with our device for another few runs of steaks before she hit on the way to cook them perfectly. Once she did, and once we tasted them perfectly done, I was sold. I decided that we needed to purchase a sous vide unit for our house.
I got online and searched. What I discovered to my absolute amazement is that there was not a sous vide unit made for the home kitchen. There were several companies making sous vide units for restaurant use, but the price of them would knock your socks off. The least expensive one – and it was tiny – ran to over a thousand dollars. Most costs many thousands of dollars. I kept thinking that there had to be a home sous vide unit somewhere, but search though I did, I couldn’t find one.
The light bulb went on.
I reasoned that I couldn’t be the only one who wanted a home sous vide unit. And of such thoughts are opportunities made. I figured it couldn’t be that tough to make a unit, since, after all, they were nothing but sophisticated Crock Pots. So I thought. As it ends up, nothing is further from the truth, but I didn’t know that at the time.
During my online searches for some kind of home sous vide machine, I came across countless articles on sous vide cooking. One of these articles contained a quote by Nathan Myhrvold – the retired Chief Technical Officer of Microsoft who has devoted his post retirement to cooking, photography* and various other endeavors – a sous vide expert who figured prominently in the Wall Street Journal article mentioned above, and who is the go-to guy whenever a writer needs a comment about sous vide. When I read these words, I knew there was a real opportunity.
Most dedicated home cooks purchase laboratory water baths, which are available on eBay, says Myhrvold.
“I believe someone will produce a home sous vide machine in the not-to-distant future,” says Myhrvold. Basically, “a Crock-Pot with [a] very accurate thermostat.”
Knowing as I did Nathan Myhrvold’s status in the food world, I reckoned he would know if someone was already working on one, and since he didn’t mention it (and since I’m an eternal optimist), I figured there wasn’t anyone working on one. So, it was full speed ahead.
What I didn’t realize was that Nathan Myhrvold was wrong. Not about the no-one working on one, but about the technology required. He made it sound easy. But, as it turns out, a sous vide cooker is much, much more than a Crock-Pot with a very accurate thermometer. To be able to cook sous vide, the temperature can’t fluctuate more than a half a degree in either direction. For example, eggs cooked at 63 degrees C (you can set the Sous Vide Supreme for either C or F) are totally different from eggs cooked at 62 or 64 degrees. Try to cook perfect eggs by setting a Crock-Pot at low, medium or hot, the temperature selections available for most. You can’t do it. The maintenance of a specific temperature for hours (and even days) is an absolute necessity in cooking sous vide, and that was what we set out to do in developing our machine. This kind of temperature control can’t be maintained with a simple thermostat mechanism.
Once we decided to make the leap and try to develop a home sous vide unit, it dawned on us that neither of us knew anything about the appliance business. So we hadn’t a clue as to how to launch such a venture. But we allowed as how there were bound to be people who did. So I set about finding them.
Through a business acquaintance, I got introduced to an entrepreneur and businessman who had some experience in the small appliance development business. (A pedigree in small appliance development would be more correct. He took The Juiceman and The Breadman from concept to success and was also an executive VP at Salton with the George Foreman Grill.)
Bob Lamson, who is now a partner in the business and a great friend, is just the kind of guy I enjoy being around. I, of course, don’t think he is nearly as smart as I am, but he may disagree. He is trained in philosophy, has a undergraduate degree from Yale, has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington, ran for US Congress as a Democrat (and almost won), is the author of a book on the economics of the defense industry, and was in a small high school philosophy study group with Barrack Obama’s mother. As you might imagine, Bob and I have many spirited conversations about many, many topics, which keep all our get togethers stimulating. He is a Seattle resident of long standing, thus our many trips to Seattle where a branch of the Sous Vide Supreme offices are located.
MD and I (MD mainly) came up with the specs for a home sous vide unit, and Bob, who knows everyone involved in the appliance business the world over, after gathering bids, recommended an engineering and design firm in London that got started on the design work. After much back and forth, and many prototypes, we finally got the design we wanted and a prototype that worked like a charm.
After a lot of consultation, we concluded that if we had any hope of bringing our product to market at a reasonable price for the home consumer, we were going to have to have it made in China, a situation about which I had considerable angst. We were confronted with the reality that if we made it somewhere else, our appliance would be too costly, and if we made it in China, it would, well, be made in China. Bob assured us that many Chinese factories were state of the art, and that it was just a matter of selecting the right one. Bob had had many products made in China (just about everything, I discovered, including the Macbook Pro I’m typing these words on is made in China) and had had no problems. He told us he would go to China himself and check out any factory we might end up using. MD and I decided to go as well.
I was in for a huge surprise. During my years as an engineer I visited many factories, so I have a pretty good feel for what US factories look like. The factory we decided to work with in China was a marvel of high technology. In their showroom were many of the products we’re all familiar with here in the US, and as we were shown through the huge work spaces, there were all these same familiar products rolling off the assembly lines. The testing facilities were beyond compare, and the engineers were terrific. In fact, the engineers there solved many of the temperature-control and cooling problems that had been plaguing us. Whenever we found anything problematic, the folks at this factory were immediately responsive in getting it fixed. After spending a couple of days at the facility, meeting the engineers, and watching the testing processes, we felt more than comfortable using this factory for our product.
What we didn’t realize when we started this venture was that the difficulty in achieving the precise temperature control necessary to sous vide cooking meant that each and every machine had to be calibrated by hand after it came off the line. The engineers at the factory developed a system to do this that required filling each machine with water and testing multiple temp settings without the process adding huge amounts to the cost of the system. I found the Chinese engineers easy to work with and incredibly understanding of all the hassle required to bring a product to market in the US.
After designing, building and working all the kinks out of our Sous Vide Supreme, one hurdle remained for us. We had to get it approved by Underwriters Laboratories (UL). No UL approval, no US sales. It was as simple as that. No retail stores will touch an appliance that isn’t UL approved, and let me tell you, UL approval isn’t easy to come by. The UL people visited the factory in China, worked with the engineers, made suggestions as to how we could improve our machine, and finally granted us the coveted UL Approved moniker just a couple of weeks ago. It was this approval I was waiting for before I wrote this post. I didn’t want to alert the world as to what we were doing until we had this final and most important process firmly in hand.
I can’t begin to tell you what an enormous project this has been. You don’t really know (I certainly didn’t) what’s involved when you go down to buy a small appliance at your local department store. We’ve had to hire designers to create logos, do artwork for the box; we’ve had to come up with how-to-use manuals (which are a part of getting a product through UL) and cooking instructions. We’ve had to test multiple iterations of the machine and tweak each one until we got it right. We’ve had our units tested in major test kitchens here and in Europe, and worked with famous chefs to get it right. We’ve had to deal with trans-oceanic freight companies and packing and shipping facilities in the US and China. We ourselves have cooked a zillion different foods in our own test kitchen. It’s been a seemingly never-ending process as you can tell by how long I’ve been putting off the great revelation. But now it’s done and ready to go.
Our PR firm, Duo PR, is sending us out on a cooking/demo tour that should start on October 18 if all goes well. Most of the gigs we’ll be going on will be private affairs for potential retailers, but if any are public, I’ll post them so that any of you who have the opportunity and so desire may come to one of the events.
If you want more information about the Sous Vide Supreme, here is the website of our company, Eades Appliance Technology, aka EAT. Sign up where indicated and we’ll email you information as it becomes available. And, BTW, the ‘Eades’ in Eades Appliance Technology means a bunch of Eadeses, not just MD and me. We’ve tapped our family for legal advice, financing, food tasting and creative assistance. So it is truly a family enterprise plus Bob, Mo and the rest of the staff at the Sous Vide Supreme office in Seattle.
Since this blog isn’t really a blog to sell stuff – other than an occasional recommendation here and there – I’m not going to be writing much on the Sous Vide Supreme. I’ll have links to the website on the links, and I’ve started a Twitter account so I can put up links on sous vide cooking. But other than those, this is pretty much it. (I may have one other major announcement, if we can get the legal-contractual issues worked out, but that should be it.) Many people have wanted to know what we’ve been working on so mysteriously, so this is it. In fact, this is the very first piece to go out into the world about the Sous Vide Supreme. Other than the team working on it, you are the first in the world to be learning about this product.
Next post I’ll be back to the nutritional stuff.
Here are a few photos of MD cooking steaks in one of the sous vide machines in our kitchen.
Here you see a couple of units on our counter so you can get the feel for the size. To the right are cooked, vacuum-sealed steaks pulled from the water bath ready to be finished. The steaks are lying in the inverted top of the Sous Vide Supreme. This top as tray was one of MD’s innovative brainstorms.
In this close up of the perfectly medium rare steaks, you can see that they have been seasoned before being put in the vacuum bags. They are now ready for the skillet. But first, you’ve got to put some butter in the skillet and heat it until the butter is foaming. Then you put the steak in and leave it for just about 20-30 seconds on one side, then flip and sear on the other side for only a few seconds.
One steak in the pan searing on one side and about ready to be flipped.
Two steaks cooked perfectly. I wish the photo were as perfect as the steaks. I intended to take a picture of the steak after it was cut, but my hunger got the best of me and I forgot.
* Nathan Myhrvold took the photos I displayed in a previous blog post.
[...] Dill You might prefer a https://www.sousvidesupreme.com/ Sous Vide Supreme | The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D. __________________ "I measure success by the degree to which I ruin other people's [...]
Any closer to knowing a UK release date? I’m close to getting a PID controller, but would rather get this sweet unit – I’m itching to start doing some proper sous vide.
A shipment of SVS is on its way to Europe right now. In fact, it may already be there. The machines have the power leads for the UK and other European countries.
That’s really great news! When/where will I be able to order one?
As soon as the units arrive in their respective countries in Europe, we should have ordering information up on the SVS website. This whole operation has grown way beyond what I can deal with, so I’m more in the background now instead of hands on. Consequently, I don’t have all the up-to-the-minute info on everything that is happening. I do know, however that our web guys are working hard on getting our website international. If you’ll keep checking, you should find a UK version of the website soon, and you can order. Or the machines should be in UK retail outlets pretty soon as well. I’m meeting with all the people who are in the know next week, so if you don’t see something up on the SVS site within about 10 days, ding me again, and I’ll give you a more current update.
*drums fingers*
*clicks Refesh on the SVS website*
*Eagerly awits UK launch with credit card in hand*
*clicks refresh again…*
I’m meeting with the guy who will know in Dayton, OH (God help me) this Wednesday. I should know something specific by then.
Hope the meeting went well.
Did they have any indication on when the European launch is going to happen?
Thanks.
Soon. We’re working on the website now. The big event of the year is the International Housewares Association show coming up next week in Chicago. Once that is over, I’m hoping we can turn our attention to the European launch.
Mike, If you have time, you know where to contact me, this time we’d love to have you as our guests.
Cheers,
Thanks, Gabe. I don’t know how much time – if any – we’ll have. We’re flying in late one day and flying out two days later. Having never been to this meeting, I don’t have a clue as to what our time demands will be. If possible, however, it would be great to get together.
Hi Dr. Eades,
I hope that you don’t mind my posting this announcement on this old thread, but I thought googlers might find it. Plus, as you know, I’m hopelessly in love with my Sous Vide Supreme, so I figured it would be okay.
* New E-mail List & Blog Carnival for Sous Vide *
I’ve recently created a mailing list and blog carnival for folks cooking sous vide: http://www.modernpaleo.com/sousvide.html
Here’s the description from the web site:
SousVide is an informal, private mailing list for people who cook sous vide, particularly home cooks. Its basic purpose is to facilitate the sharing of information, resources, recipes, and tips related to cooking sous vide.
All and only subscribers to SousVide are eligible to submit posts to Sous Vide Review, a blog carnival featuring the best posts of the month on sous vide cooking hosted by The Modern Paleo Blog ( http://blog.ModernPaleo.com ).
SousVide is not moderated, but members who violate its very basic rules will be subject to moderation, if not unsubscribed.
The list is part of my “Modern Paleo” web site ( http://www.ModernPaleo.com ), but you don’t need to eat or advocate a paleo-type diet to join the list.
You can subscribe here: http://groups.google.com/group/sousvide/subscribe
If you have any problems subscribing, just drop me an e-mail, as I can subscribe you manually.
Please feel free to spread the word! I’m hoping that the list and carnival can become a major resource as we experiment with sous vide cooking.
FYI, I’ve blogged a bit about my own experiments with sous vide here:
http://blog.modernpaleo.com/search/label/Sous%20Vide
I don’t mind at all. MD and I are going to join the sous vide google group.
Hi Dr Eades, apologies for asking again, but is there any news of a UK release date? We’re “champing at the bit”, so to speak, credit cards out and ready…
Our European representative will be here late tomorrow, so I’ll find out the answer then. Sorry it has taken so long, but things work differently in the Old World.
Yeah, I’m also keen to get my hands on one too!
Just found out that the SVS should be online for UK orders starting next week.
Any news from the European meeting?
Should be available online in the UK next week.
I’m not usually cynical but was than April Fool? Or am I looking in the wrong place?
Not April Fool, that’s for sure. I have nothing to do with the European launch of the product. Whenever I ask, I’m told that it will be in a week or so. After every week that it doesn’t happen, I ask again. I get told that there were a few problems here and there and it will be a week. I do think we are very close. We have about 3,000 machines in Europe right now – it would be nice if we could have them available.
Thanks for getting back to me Dr Eades,
It seems cleverer people than I have find this on the Souvide Supreme website – https://www.sousvidesupreme.com/uk/shop/ so it does indeed look like the UK launch is iminent!
Sadly the bump in pricing, if correct, to £550 (approx $850 at today’s exchange rates) has put it way out of my budget.
Still, kudos to you for starting the ball rolling. Thanks again.
The price you see is a placeholder at this point. As I mentioned to an earlier commenter, we provide the machines to European retailers at our US wholesale price. They add for import duties, VAT, distributor costs (we don’t have these in the US), and retail markup. After all that, the price ends up whatever it ends up, but we still make the same amount as we do when we sell one in the US for $449.
The UK price is absolutely insane, it’s essentially double the dollar price. Was going to buy one, will definitely not now.
Sigh. Take a look at my response to earlier commenters about this. We have nothing to do with the ultimate retail price.
I know the site is not live yet, but the UK shop page is showing a price of £549 plus shipping (USA is USA $449). In the UK we are (unfortunately) used to US products costing the same in £ sterling as US Dollars, but not substantially more. I know there are dealer costs, certification costs, VAT, etc, etc, but I hope this is a placeholder price, and it will be lower – as at this level it is just too much to get away with as an “ooh, I’ll treat myself” purchase.
Anyway, it is a great product, and good luck with it!
I don’t know what the price is going to end up in the various countries in Europe. We are charging our same wholesale price in US dollars in all other countries. By the time the import duties, VAT, distributor charges and retail charges are added in, the price becomes whatever it becomes.
Hey hey! Saw the new TV advertisement for the SVS the other night. Well done! Saw Dr. Mary Dan next to the machine and lifting out the tray (the ad seems to be made partially out of your instructional video).
Very nice ad. (And if I didn’t already have one, I’d buy one! {wink}) We had lovely steak tonight — around 3 hours at 138 degrees… Lovely texture: Interestingly, I dislike medium rare and rare beef elsewhere, but the texture from the SVS is so nice, I CAN eat and enjoy medium rare!
Was about to order the SousVide from Dean & Deluca as they seem to have the best price, but noticed that the SousVide is made in China, and D&D will not accept returns on this machine. Do you have any distributors here in NYC where one can see the SousVide before purchasing it? Is there only one model? I was thinking of making a brisket with it and was wondering what is the largest piece of meat that can comfortable fit into the cooker?
Yes, you can see and touch the SVS at any Sur La Table store. I think there is a big one in Soho. And I’m sure they will accept returns.
Well, you could always send me a unit and I’ll pay you back later
. Or we could be the first wave of reviewers and shill you mercilesslly.
Sous vide looks incredible, and I’m dying to give it a go. But I just can’t get past my concerns about plasticisers, phthalates, endocrine disruptors etc. leaching from the plastic into the meat. I’m very much hoping my concerns are misplaced, but hours of searching haven’t found anything authoritative-looking on the matter.
Seven months ago, you said “Take a look at the link to the Australian article in the previous comment. A lot of restaurants apparently aren’t worried about the plastic bag issue. Bags made for sous vide don’t really leach into the food. Based on all the comments I’ve gotten on that subject, however, makes me realize that we will have to address this issue head on.” Has this been addressed yet?
With all the talk on this site about food science, and the potential for chemical harm from our food, I’m very surprised that this question appears to have been addressed so casually…
I’d have thought this could be put to bed for once and for all by sous vide-ing some high-fat meat, and sending it to a lab for analysis. That we haven’t seen the results of such a test only makes me more wary that the results aren’t positive. As much as I’d love to get into sous vide (and buy an SVS), with 2 children at home I just can’t do it with this level of uncertainty around the safety of cooking in plastic.
These studies have been done, at least with the bags we sell. We’ve put them at high temperatures for long periods of time and found virtually zero contamination of the test products contained within. The plastics in the bags are heat stable. And, foods cooked sous vide are kept at low temperatures relative to any other cooking method out there, which even minimizes more any risk for contamination.
Can you publish the actual results of these tests?
Hi,
Do you have the sous vide supreme in 230AC for Singapore? (same as UK)
Yep, we’ve got them in a warehouse in London. Now if we could just get a bank account opened, we could sell them. Unbelievable how difficult it is to open a simple business account, not to mention dealing with all the VAT and the rest of the bureaucracy. We’ve at least got a UK landing page now with a full website that will be up in a couple of weeks.
There’s a problem with your sidebar.. thought you’d probably want to know
As much as I hate to bang on, but have you heard anything more on the European (UK) launch? It’s all gone a bit quiet…
I know it’s not in your hands, but maybe you could give someone a poke to see if they can shed any light on it.
Thanks
zdz
I take it you have not checked their website out lately? £499 plus shipping
http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/product.aspx?productid=21&deptid=1&
[...] and I got a Sous Vide Supreme as a wedding present, and he has been making some pretty damn tasty things with it. Yesterday, I [...]
Yippee, I just ordered mine. I got to hear that John Lewis here in the UK were selling them. I went online and found only three left in stock, so bought one immediately. At £350, its considerably cheaper than the £500 they were being sold at direct (which was just a little bit too high for me). No doubt, they’ll come down in price in the same way that microwaves did, but that’s life…..
I can now get rid of the messy trail of wires, PID controller and large water boiler that is my current sous vide setup. Hopefully I can sell the old set-up on eBay before everyone cottons on they can buy an all-in-one Sous Vide Supreme.
Great! I hope you enjoy it. Keep me posted.
Hi – great story! I just wanted to ask why the price in Singapore is well over USD600 from Sia Huat? Cheers, P.
Our company sells the units to various retailers throughout the world at our wholesale price. Once they get it, we have no control over how they those to price it.
i know this is your first product as a manufacturer, but you’re making a grave error creating price inefficiencies in foreign markets by refusing to take a lower margin to guarantee price equality. this is the whole point of an MSRP, and aside from a VAT markup you will rarely see any other.
what you’re doing by remaining price inflexible in your own margin is creating animosity wrt to your product and brand from your client base in foreign markets (you’re seeing that in the comments above). of COURSE you have control, you’re the manufacturer. competitive manufacturers who are concerned about brand management and market share will not only take lower margins, but implement price controls on foreign vendors and simply not sell to them if they violate them. the other strategy used is to create the distribution/import strategies in the foreign markets first before selling them, otherwise, the market is not pursued.
what you’re risking, is for other manufacturer’s to come in and easily compete, without you having laid much foundation in market share besides you having been there longer. it really isn’t a question of if, it’s a question of when. my advice, is to initially take the lower margin, get your distribution setup in your target markets and/or implement controls, and make up the difference later while gaining very valuable initial market share.
although quoting anonymously, i feel compelled to share that i’m an executive at a fortune 500 and spend a good amount of time considering and implementing the practicalities of the strategies above. i enjoy your blog, so urge you to consider my thoughts. good luck!
I have been very interested in this for a long time and wonder where I could but a machine in Hong Kong where I live.
I don’t know. As far as I know, we have no distributors in Hong Kong at present. You can try Sia Huat in Singapore if that’s an option.