What is green or white, made of aluminium and sits in the kitchen corner for three generations? The Tatung rice cooker, of course. But if the answer eluded you, do not worry; you would have to be Taiwanese to get it.
Nearly every Taiwanese kitchen has one; no couple would go to the altar without one; traveling students take them abroad for a nostalgic taste of home. Welcome to the Tatung rice cooker--a source of nourishment for three generations, and as much the symbol of home and hearth for the average Taiwanese as anything you can find in the house.
For those who fret about--as well as battle to protect--dying local traditions, the Tatung at least is safe, with sales of around 300,000 cookers every year, according to Ku Wen-yang, president of Tatung Consumer Products (Taiwan) Co.--not bad for a product design virtually unchanged in 44 years.
“Tatung has a steady 80 percent share of the domestic market [for rice cookers],” says Ku, adding, “last year we saw more than 10-percent growth from the year before, which was remarkable taking into account the fact that we raised our prices while others cut theirs.”
“Remarkable” is indeed the word when you consider that Tatung is competing against all-bells-and-whistles, high-tech Japanese imports. But, then, the rice-cooker market is one consumer niche that has eluded Japanese ingenuity in Taiwan--for that matter, phasing out its tried-and-trusted mother’s little helper has eluded even Tatung itself.
Having shouldered aside a swathe of would-be contenders that attempted to muscle into the rice-cooker market from the early 1960s, ironically Tatung found its most popular product has stymied its own efforts to create a new product market. When the company attempted to introduce stylish, modern upgrades, consumers turned their noses up at them in favor of the cookers they grew up with. For a brief moment during the 1980s, it is true, the Japanese looked like toppling Tatung’s rice-cooker supremacy, when Mitsubishi introduced a fully automatic line that ate into Tatung’s market share. But the threat was short-lived. For much of the 1980s, Tatung’s sales of the cooker dropped to an annual average of 220,000 pieces from 310,000. By 1988, however, sales had rebounded back to around 300,000.
“We received many calls from old customers who had defected from our customer base,” says Dolly Wang, engineer in charge of marketing plans at the company’s Import Business Department. “They said they switched back to our traditional rice cookers after they realized that the ‘more advanced’ cookers weren’t as versatile and didn’t last as long.”
Versatile may not be a word that springs to mind when it comes to rice cookers, but in Taiwan the rice cooker is as much the kitchen workhorse as the oven is in the West--or even the microwave. In a Taiwanese kitchen, the rice cooker is plugged in whenever there are soups or stews to be made, traditional medicine to be prepared, or leftovers to be heated up. The traditional Tatung makes such “multi-tasking” possible; the high-tech modern brands just cook rice.
Ku credits the product’s success to its quality and long-established reputation as an able kitchen-hand. When it was introduced in 1960, the cooker was designed to suit the needs of local consumers that have clearly changed very little, if at all, in the four decades that have followed.
The original cooker included a two-part set: a rice pot and a shallow, pan-shaped steamer that could be set atop the pot to cook other dishes. As for the cookers themselves, they came in four different sizes--for six, eight, 10, or 12 diners. Heating the cooker is a plate, containing a single element formed by 3.6cm-diameter wires, which indirectly heats the contents. This ensures the heat is evenly distributed inside the cooker, which in turn ensures evenly cooked rice. Even heating is also ensured by the shape and thickness of the pots. Tatung adopts a costly casting method that involves pouring the liquid aluminium into a mold, and all this amounts in the end, say happy consumers, to the perfect bowl of rice.
The rice cooker is a trusted product from a company that has been with the Taiwanese for almost a century, even though it was slow to actually make its move into consumer electronics. In fact, when it was founded in 1908, Tatung was a construction company, undertaking public works for the Japanese administration, and not developing its first electric product--a fan --until 1949. Looking to Japan for product ideas, the rice cooker soon followed.
Today’s model is the result of trial and error, and the hard labor of introducing an electric rice cooker to a market that was accustomed to preparing meals on charcoal stoves. Indeed, in those days, the company’s salesmen had to go door to door and from one traditional market to another by bicycle or motorcycle demonstrating the cookers to consumers who had never heard of such a new-fangled idea.
The first year, the company sold 2,279 rice cookers across the country. Total sales rose to more than 100,000 in 1967, and by 1973 had exceeded 200,000, soon jumping to a stable average of 220,000 to 310,000 units every year.
Looking back on Tatung’s assault on the domestic market, Ku notes that the company had domination of the market within a decade, and a near monopoly a decade after that. “Latecomers didn’t stand a chance,” he says.
Especially, once the company released its 1958, 51st anniversary “Tatung Angel,” a plastic doll of a baby boy in a sports uniform with a ball in his hand. Seemingly every family in Taiwan had a “Tatung Angel,” which came free with purchases of Tatung products, and a generation grew up humming along to the Tatung advertising jingle: “Tatung, Tatung, local products are the best.” The reliability of its rice cookers was the perfect vehicle for the company to expand into a host of other consumer electronic products--from refrigerators to televisions.
But at the heart of the Tatung success story is the humble rice cooker. Ku calls it a product that sells itself. Tatung’s new distribution channels include hypermarkets and appliance outlets, as well as more than 200 service stations and over 300 commission-based or contracted shops that sell Tatung electronic products exclusively. As for the trusted cooker, the marketing and advertising departments can relax and let it sell on its word-of-mouth reputation.
As Ku notes, even families that have bought imported models will still often want to have a Tatung model at home for other cooking tasks. And, if the new models break down, chances are the Tatung will still be going strong.
Says Wang: Competitors find it very difficult to challenge Tatung’s market share given due to Tatung’s quality control, as much as anything else. And with a defective ratio as low as 0.05 percent that, she says, is very hard to beat.
Ku, for one, is confident the cooker is a product that will be around for some time. “We learned to use the cookers from our parents,” he says. “Our children will learn to use the same ones from us.”