IKEA Investigating Reports Of Shiny Serving Bowls That Can Set Food On Fire Image courtesy of Richard Walter on Facebook | IKEA
These days, most products involved in sudden fires involve malfunctioning batteries, or poorly built fuel lines. But then there’s the IKEA bowl — and the flaming fruit contained therein — that serve as a reminder that you sometimes only really need the sun and the right shiny surface to start a fire.
A Swedish man told Aftonbladet (via The Local) that he was enjoying some grapes from his IKEA Blanda Blank metal bowl — which is also available here in the U.S. — outdoors over the weekend, when temperatures were heating up.
Then he smelled smoke, which was weird, because grapes are not particularly known for that flavor profile. He thought perhaps his neighbors were cooking on the grill, until he saw the fruit was on fire.
“‘How is that possible?’ I thought. Then I saw there was one intense point where (the sun) hit the twigs, and that’s where it started,” he told the Aftonbladet.
And to convince the non-believers out there, he repeated the trick with a piece of newspaper and posted the footage on Facebook:
IKEA tells Aftonbladet it will investigate and do some further testing on the bowls, while noting 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.”
And if something in the bowl should catch fire, the dish’s round design “further contributes to a very low risk of spreading,” a spokesperson told the paper.
“We take this information very seriously and will now investigate what happened,” he added.
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