Pepper Cannon Unboxing

A buddy of mine just got Männkitchen's new Pepper Cannon.

If you haven't seen their Kickstarter, it's essentially the Ferrari of pepper grinders. They claim right on their own page that you can "pepper your steak in 7 cranks instead of 70". We're going to open this thing up and put that claim to the test.

First off, the outside box has some nice branding. I appreciated the bold claim of "More pepper, less cranking" right by the UPC/barcode.

Opening the outer box up, there's a much nicer box inside, plastic wrapped with a nice textured surface.

This box contains some protective foam. the Pepper Cannon, the manual, and a spare O-ring.

I wanted to get a good sense of scale for the Pepper Cannon, so here are some shots of it lying down and standing up next to my own pepper grinder of choice, the Oxo Accent Pepper Grinder, as well as a classic Peugeot pepper grinder on hand at the venue.

The Pepper Cannon is surprisingly not huge. It feels nice in the hand and is easy to crank. The top opens for filling by pressing a smoothly-actuating button and the bottom pops off easily, as it is held on by an O-ring.

The grinder on the bottom looks just as it does on their website, and adjusts easily.

I devised a simple test to see how effective this was versus my own Oxo pepper grinder mentioned above.

We cranked each pepper grinder until my kitchen scale recorded 3 grams. We counted the number of cranks it took each grinder to reach that. Both grinders were set to coarser settings to be able to compare the output as well.

Right from the get-go, it was apparent that my Oxo would struggle compared to the mighty Pepper Cannon.

The Oxo's grind was coarse, but a bit inconsistent. From personal experience, it does much more consistently when set to a finer grind.

The Pepper Cannon's output was surprisingly consistent. The pepper was extremely uniform, especially when compared to the Oxo above.

Here are both pepper mills' outputs side-by-side.

The final tally for number of cranks to get to 3 grams is as follows:

• Oxo Accent Pepper Grinder: 66 cranks
• Männkitchen Pepper Cannon: 10 cranks

The results are not even close. They are EXTREMELY close to Männkitchen's advertised "pepper your steak in 7 cranks instead of 70".

Overall, it's an undoubtedly impressive product. It definitely is "the Ferrari of pepper grinders" and if you have the money to spend and love pepper, it may be an extremely worthwhile investment for you.

The Männkitchen Pepper Cannon retails for $199.00 as of time of writing. This one was purchased by my friend on a discount from their crowdfunding campaign prior to launch.

For comparison, my own Oxo Accent Pepper Grinder retails for $25.99. The results speak for themselves, whether it is worth the difference is up to you to decide.