Picture the scene. You're in your apartment getting ready to prepare a nice summer salad with the help of your new Blanda Blank bowl from Ikea, when all of a sudden, something strange happens: The bowl starts smoking and your salad has been turned into a pile of sad kale cremains. Chuckling to yourself at the seemingly ludicrous situation? Us too.
But the thing is, this actually happened. Atlas Obscura is reporting that this stainless-steel Blanda Blank bowl — which, according the the Ikea website, retails for $4.99 but is available "in several different materials and sizes to mix and match according to your tastes and needs" — gave a Swedish customer quite a shock earlier this week when his snack-making time soon turned into fire-extinguishing time. The man, Richard Walter, claims he was enjoying some grapes on a sunny afternoon when he suddenly smelled smoke. He soon realized that it wasn't from a neighbor's outdoor barbecue, but rather the Ikea bowl that he put the grapes in.
"I saw it was burning in the grape bowl. How is that possible? I thought," he stated. "Then I saw there was one intense point where [the sun] hit the twigs, and that's where it started."
Walter didn't capture the incident on video as he was too preoccupied with putting out the fire, but to prove what happened, he later posted a video on Facebook that shows the bowl easily burning a piece of newspaper while in the sunlight.
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Luckily, Ikea is on top of things—it is aware of the incident and is actively investigating what occurred. "Product safety is always a top priority at Ikea and Ikea products are always tested to comply with applicable standards and legislations," the company said in a statement to The Local. "In risk assessment for the bowl Blanda it has been established that many different parameters would have to converge for the content of the bowl to overheat and that the risk for this to happen is very low. The round design of the bowl further contributes to a very low risk of spreading, in case of any overheated material in the bowl."
Phew. Crisis averted. But if you're still hesitant about using the Blanda while eating grapes on the terrace, you're in luck. It's Ikea! There are many, many other bowls to choose from.
