Why the $300 Tortilla Maker Will Fall Flat

A Kickstarter for a kitchen appliance called the Flatev has an interesting proposition: It combines the joy of living in Mexico (where you can run down to the corner to buy freshly made tortillas) with the convenience of one of those Keurig® coffee machines (where you plop a plastic canister with a pre-measured amount of coffee grounds into the machine to make coffee).

I live in Mexico right now, and here’s the tiny hole-in-the-wall on the corner where we buy tortillas, which are amazing.

I hate to be that guy. The naysaying naysayer who craps all over someone’s vision for a new kind of kitchen appliance.

But this is a bad idea, and I’ll tell you why.

Tortillas are made with corn masa and water. It’s cheap, easy and delicious to make. And making them by hand is a joy.

Whenever predicting the success of a product, people often fail because they don’t consider the size of the potential market. They (especially my friends in the tech press) tend to think “ooooh, I want that, and therefore the product is going to succeed in the market.” That’s a terrible way to predict the success of a product.

A tortilla press costs $10 and is super easy to use.

So let’s do a thought experiment. I want you to imagine a Venn diagram. One circle is the world of hippy or yuppie foodies who are committed enough to freshly-made tortillas that they’re willing to sacrifice $300. (You can go ahead and lump me into that category.)

Making tortillas is fast, easy and requires almost no skill.

The next circle includes people who don’t care that their corn masa comes in wasteful plastic canisters and who don’t mind that their masa isn’t actually fresh, but pre-made in a factory.

Baked tortillas don’t taste nearly as good as tortillas made the way tortillas are made, which is on a flat grill.

Another circle includes the people who are willing to devote a huge amount of countertop space to the single task of making tortillas.

Super-foodies love tacos made with freshly made tortillas, but are not the sort of people who want to get their masa from a factory in a wasteful plastic canister.

These three circles are usually different people. The super foodies who want fresh tortillas instead of the semi-fresh tortillas you can buy anywhere are a different group of people than the convenience crowd who doesn’t care whether their masa is pre-mixed, non-fresh and sitting in a wasteful plastic container. Add in the requirement of countertop space to burn, and you’ve eliminated city-dwelling people who live in cramped apartments.

Plastic canisters work for coffee because coffee drinkers are essentially drug addicts. The committed fresh tortilla crowd is a different crowd.

The super-foodies are going to buy organic masa and make their own in a bowl by hand. The convenience crowd is going to pick up a bag of tortillas when they’re at the store and keep them in the fridge for when they need them. And the people with $300 plus a huge amount of available kitchen countertop space narrows the market even further.

I’m sorry, but the Flatev tortilla maker is a non-starter.

And don’t even get me started about bacon-flavored tortillas.