Four people suffered severe burns after the lid of a Gourmia GPC625 pressure cooker blew open while the unit was still pressurized, spraying scalding food across kitchens. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) told consumers to stop using the appliance immediately, citing five reported incidents among the roughly 43,500 units sold, most of them through Best Buy between 2017 and 2020. At least two lawsuits have been filed. The Gourmia warning is not an isolated case: the same lid-detachment hazard has triggered recalls across multiple brands, raising questions about whether a shared design weakness runs through the consumer pressure cooker market.
Repeat burn injuries across three brands point to a systemic lid defect
The Gourmia GPC625 is the latest in a string of pressure cookers flagged by federal regulators for the same basic failure. According to the CPSC, the lid on these units can be rotated or lifted while the pot is still under pressure, allowing superheated liquid and food to eject violently; regulators have already logged four severe burn injuries from five incidents involving this model.
The pattern extends well beyond one product line. SharkNinja recalled about 1,846,400 Foodi OP300 series pressure cookers in the United States, plus additional units sold in Canada, after receiving reports of 158 lid-opening incidents and 106 burn injuries, more than 50 of them second- or third-degree. Twenty-six lawsuits were filed in connection with that recall. Sunbeam Products similarly recalled its Crock-Pot 6-Quart Express Crock Multi-Cookers under Recall No. 21-035 after receiving 119 reports of lid detachment and documenting 99 burn injuries, including burns up to third-degree.
Three different companies, three different product lines, and the same hazard description in every CPSC notice: the lid can open or detach while the vessel is pressurized, and hot contents spray out. That repetition is what makes the Gourmia warning significant beyond its relatively small unit count. When the same failure mode appears in products from Gourmia, SharkNinja, and Sunbeam, the question shifts from whether one manufacturer cut corners to whether something in the basic lid-interlock design, the spring mechanism, or gasket tolerances that prevent opening under pressure is inadequate across the category.
Pressure cookers are supposed to be engineered so that residual pressure physically prevents the lid from turning or lifting. In principle, even if a user attempts to open the cooker too early, the interlock should hold until the internal pressure drops to a safe level. The incidents described in the CPSC records suggest that, in these models, that safeguard did not work reliably. Either the interlock allowed the lid to move before pressure dissipated, or the lid was forced off by internal pressure despite being nominally locked.
CPSC records and consumer filings document the same failure sequence
The strongest evidence for a recurring defect sits in the CPSC’s own records. Each recall notice describes a nearly identical sequence: the cooker locks, builds internal pressure, and then allows the lid to be removed or ejects the lid on its own while pressure remains. Consumer narratives filed through the agency’s public database describe the same chain of events. One incident report on SaferProducts.gov, for example, details pressurized contents being expelled from a cooker immediately after the user attempted to open it, consistent with the pattern documented in all three recalls.
The Crock-Pot recall generated a substantial paper trail. The CPSC released redacted documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, catalogued as FOIA Request 21-F-00610, covering internal evaluation and correspondence related to Recall 21-035. Those records represent the most detailed publicly available window into how regulators assessed the lid-locking hazard for at least one of the affected brands. They show staff focusing on whether the lid could be rotated far enough to open while there was still measurable internal pressure, and how frequently that failure might occur in real-world use.
No equivalent FOIA package has surfaced for the SharkNinja or Gourmia cases, leaving important gaps. Across all three products, the CPSC’s public hazard descriptions center on the same mechanical point: the interlock that should prevent the lid from opening while the pot holds pressure failed to do so. The agency has not published a comparative engineering analysis explaining whether the interlocks share a common supplier, a common design standard, or a common tolerance range. But the consistency of the failure mode-lid opens under pressure and hot contents escape-is itself a data point. It suggests the problem is unlikely to be random assembly errors on one production line and more likely tied to how these lids are designed to stay sealed.
Consumer filings add qualitative detail. Several reports describe users following the instruction manual, waiting for what they believed was sufficient time, and still encountering a violent release of steam and food when the lid moved. Others describe the lid appearing to unlock on its own, with the contents erupting without any deliberate attempt to open the cooker. While these narratives are anecdotal and sometimes incomplete, they mirror the core failure sequence identified by CPSC staff.
Missing engineering data and what Gourmia owners should do now
Several questions remain open. The CPSC has not released detailed internal engineering evaluations of the lid-locking mechanisms for the Gourmia or SharkNinja cookers beyond the high-level summaries in the recall and warning notices. No public dataset links specific serial numbers or manufacturing date codes to individual injury reports across the three actions. And none of the three manufacturers have made public the design-change documents they submitted to the CPSC after their respective recalls, so there is no way for consumers or independent engineers to compare the original and revised interlock designs.
That lack of transparency leaves consumers in a difficult position. For Gourmia GPC625 owners, the immediate guidance is clear: the CPSC has urged people to stop using the cooker entirely and to follow the company’s remedy process, which may include a refund, replacement, or other compensation. Because the warning is not a full recall at this stage, the precise remedy terms could change as the agency’s investigation continues, but the safety advice is unambiguous. Continuing to cook under pressure with a unit that regulators say can open while pressurized carries a risk of catastrophic burns.
Owners of the recalled SharkNinja and Crock-Pot models should verify whether their specific unit falls within the affected date codes and model ranges listed in the recall notices. If it does, they should stop using the pressure-cooking function and pursue the recall remedy, which typically involves a repair kit, replacement lid, or other modification designed to strengthen the interlock. Even if a particular unit has never malfunctioned, the recall data indicate that the underlying design can fail under normal household use.
The broader question is whether these three cases represent the full scope of the problem or just the portion that has surfaced through injury reports. Without comparative engineering data, it is impossible to say whether other brands use substantially different lid-locking architectures or rely on similar mechanisms that have not yet produced enough documented incidents to trigger regulatory action. For now, the available evidence supports a narrower but still troubling conclusion: at least three major product lines, sold over several years by three different companies, shared a vulnerability that allowed lids to open or detach under pressure, leading to dozens of severe burn injuries.
Until regulators or manufacturers provide more detailed technical disclosures, consumers can only mitigate risk by adhering strictly to instructions, avoiding manual pressure release toward the face or body, and retiring any unit that falls under a CPSC warning or recall. The emerging pattern across Gourmia, SharkNinja, and Sunbeam suggests that when a pressure cooker’s lid design fails, it tends to fail in the same way-and the consequences, measured in second- and third-degree burns, are too severe to ignore.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
