In the mid-70s, TT Jagannathan had just taken the reins of Prestige and had started to expand when he was hit with a peculiar problem: the company’s pressure cookers were not selling outside the South.

Share Market Live

NSE

“Something was going wrong. There was no market,” he recalled in an interview with CNBC-TV18's Mangalam Maloo in 2018. (Watch the conversation between minutes five and 10 of the interview below.)

Jagannathan decided to find out what was going wrong. He travelled to UP meeting a dealer in Lucknow. “I found that our pressure cookers were known to burst. He showed me dozens of Prestige pressure cookers that had burst. We were losing market share because people were saying: Don't buy Prestige pressure cookers, they will burst.”

The Prestige chief was shocked. He could swear by the quality of cookers that the company made. So Jagannathan looked into the problem and identified it.

“It was a spurious safety valve,” he said.

When the pressure in a cooker builds up, the weight whistle regulates by releasing it. But if the steam vent tube gets blocked, the safety salve is supposed to open.

Cookers typically last decades but their parts needed to be replaced. And while Prestige made high-quality safety valves, made of tin bismuth, an expensive alloy, the after-market spare parts were made of aluminium, a cheaper material. And would fail.

“Our company would have gone bankrupt if this continued,” Jagannathan said.

An IIT engineer by education, Jagannathan got down to brass tacks to figure out a solution. Soon, he had one.

“I came up with what is now known as the gasket release system,” he recalled.

The gasket is the rubber ring inserted within the outer rim of the pressure cooker. The gasket keeps the lid secured such that the lid does not fly off when pressure builds inside the cooker.

Jagannathan’s GRS innovation was basically ensuring that the rubber ring bulges outward in case of high pressure, releasing steam downward without harming the person standing next to the cooker. A simple solution that now serves as a second layer of safety between the weight whistle and the safety value. This solved the problem of Prestige’s cookers bursting, even if spurious safety valves were cooked.

“It was such a simple thing that looking back, I wonder why nobody thought of it before,” he said.

Then Jagannathan did something that would look unthinkable at first: not only did he not patent the GRS, he encouraged his competition to adopt it. But as he explained, there were two very good reasons to not do so.

“In the US, pressure cookers used to burst and so people moved away from pressure cookers. That is something I wanted to avoid in India,” he explained. “And India is the largest market for pressure cookers today. So I did not want pressure cookers to get a bad name.”

“Two, if a pressure cooker would burst anywhere, people would think it was a Prestige pressure. So I wanted to avoid that misconception. By allowing other manufacturers to use the GRS, we could improve the safety of all pressure cookers.”

Backstory: How Ujala's parent bought Henkel - by doubling the offer even before starting talks

(Edited by : Nazim)

First Published:Nov 12, 2020 10:12 PM IST