Furniture retailer Ikea is taking some heat after a man claimed its “BLANDA BLANK” bowl can set objects on fire.
The $4.99 bowl, which is still for sale on Ikea’s website, is made of stainless steel. Richard Walter of Sweden said he smelled smoke coming from the bowl when he was eating grapes over the weekend.
“I saw it was burning in the grape bowl. 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,” Walter told the Swedish tabloid Aftonblade, via The Local.
He later reenacted the scene ― minus the grapes ― for a video he posted on Facebook. The clip shows how direct sunlight on the bowl could start a fire.
“For those of you who had a hard time believing it when it suddenly caught fire in my grapes on the balcony, I’ve done a little experiment to clarify how it all happened,” Walter wrote on Facebook.
Mona Astra Liss, U.S. Corporate Public Relations Director for Ikea, told HuffPost in a statement:
Product safety is always a top priority at Ikea and Ikea products are always tested to comply with applicable standards and legislations. 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.”
As long as it’s not going to cause any serious damage, setting the bowl out in the sun sounds like the perfect way to heat up some of those delicious Ikea meatballs. We at HuffPost also suggest renaming the bowl to something along the lines of:
FYRESTAARTER
BURNSFAST
TOORCH
KOMBĂśST
FIREBĂ–L
LYT
CHAAR
SKORCH
SKAALD
FLAAMES
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