SharkNinja's Food Preparation Appliances division posted $404.8 million in Q2 2025 revenue — up 52.8% year-over-year. The culprit? The Ninja CREAMi and its frozen drink cousin, the SLUSHi.
The hardware sales tell one story. The behavior those sales are creating tells another. SharkNinja told Axios their products have generated nearly 2 billion social media impressions with almost zero advertising spend. The virality is entirely user-driven.
The Ninja CREAMi Facebook community hit 500,000 members by mid-2024 and shows no signs of slowing. TikTok hashtags have racked up billions of views. These aren't casual users sharing pretty photos. They're obsessing over freeze curves, stabilizer ratios, respin protocols, and thaw times.
Normal people are becoming process engineers for ice cream.
The bridge between device popularity and software support doesn't exist yet. Nobody's built it.
The Whirlpool Lesson
Back in 2017, Whirlpool paid roughly $100 million to acquire Yummly, a recipe platform with 20 million users. The thesis: recipes are behavior. They're intent signals. They're the "what do I make tonight?" moment that happens thousands of times per household per year.
Whirlpool wanted to own that moment. They envisioned recipes flowing directly to connected ovens, guided cooking, the whole smart kitchen dream.
By April 2024, Whirlpool laid off the entire Yummly team.
Yummly was solving the wrong problem. Most cooking doesn't need guided automation. You don't need software to tell you when your chicken breast is done.
The CREAMi is different.
The device processes a frozen solid block into creamy dessert through a specific shaving and churning mechanism. Tiny variables cascade. Icy texture means you need stabilizer adjustment or sugar alcohol rebalancing. Crumbly means wrong thaw time, needs liquid addition, respin protocol. Chalky protein is a base engineering problem.
A recipe doesn't solve this. A protocol does.
Why Recipe Apps Fail the CREAMi Test
The lazy interpretation: huge community means make a recipe library and run ads.
That already exists. The market is telling you it's insufficient.
Prominent Android CREAMi recipe apps sit around 3.4/5 stars. The reviews are predictable: "recipes don't work," "my ice cream came out icy," "needs troubleshooting."
Here's what users are actually doing: troubleshooting in Facebook comments, cross-referencing TikTok videos, building personal spreadsheets. One blogger described remaking the same recipe 20+ times to get it right. Registered dietitians are publishing guides on which protein powders work best with which thickening agents.
The information exists. It's scattered, unsearchable, and inconsistent.
People aren't struggling to find recipes. They're struggling to get the outcome they saw in the video.
The Product: A Dessert Compiler
The core insight: recipes are content. Protocols are product.
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