This just might be the year of innovation for the gas grill. Because of the tight competition manufacturers are looking to capture the market with new products. Take for instance the idea of top down grilling. If you are a fan of the Food Network you’ve probably seen chefs using a salamander to cook foods. This gas powered unit uses infrared burners mounted on top to focus heat down on an adjustable position cooking grate. This eliminated flare-ups since grease falls away from the burner and not towards it. Two companies will introduce their own versions of this, the first commercially available salamander grill. First is Twin Eagles SalamanGrill. This is a small unit that will cook about four steaks at a time and in 8 minutes. Next up will be Cook Industries’ Cook House. This is a much larger four burner unit that can cook enough to keep a restaurant going. The Twin Eagles unit will cost around $1,600. The Cook Industries unit will be around $2,600. Both units should be on the market by early summer. Should these prove successful, look for many manufacturers to jump into this market.
Infrared is big, and more and more manufacturers are getting on the boat. Modern Home Products (MHP) has beat the market by introducing an all infrared and an infrared/standard gas grill for under $1,000. This puts infrared grilling in the price range of a lot more people. Of course the rush is on. Last year TEC, the inventors of infrared grilling, and Char-Broil entered into a partnership to produce Char-Broil gas grills with infrared burners for under $1,000. They will be on the market by $1,000. Exactly what they will look like and how they will work is still up in the air. The biggest part of the deal is that Char-Broil gets TEC’s new technology while everyone else will be stuck with the old version.
TEC’s great innovation is the introduction of the 100% infrared burner. Old infrared burners convert about 60% of the output of a gas burner to infrared, this new technology converts nearly 99% of that energy to infrared. Question is, what will consumers think of this new technology. The new infrared burner is capped by a tinted piece of ceramic glass on which sits the cooking grate. No visible flame and a grill that looks more like a ceramic cook top than a gas grill. Whether you and I buy it, TEC has already won many awards from the restaurant industry and stands to make a lot of money on a technology they will control for the next 20 years, thanks to some very good patent lawyers.
On the big brand news front, Weber isn’t changing its signature line of Genesis or Summit grills this year. This year they are focusing on the Q. Last year, Weber introduced its portable Q grill and Baby-Q. What they found was that this portable wasn’t getting around as much as they thought. While these little, single burner grills sold very, very well most people were buying them for patios and balconies because they were limited on space and the Q fit the bill perfectly. So this year there will be models going all the way up to the $360 USD Weber Q 300, a two burner, indirect capable unit sold with cart and fitted for 20-pound propane tanks. This many just be the ultimate “little” grill.
A brand name you will find at Target stores this year is Amana. Made by SureHeat (makers of Altima, Costco’s Sonoma, Frigidaire and Electrolux grills), there are two versions of this grill. The very inferior Target version is almost completely 430 stainless steel, but the appliance market versions will be completely 304 stainless (and more money). Amana, a division of Maytag, licensed the name to SureHeat and by all accounts put them through a lot of testing before okaying the use of their name. Perhaps they learned a lesson from the Lowe’s/Nexgrill/Jenn-Air deal.
Nexgrill continues to make many grills under many names and appears to be learning as they go. By all accounts support has improved and this years Jenn-Air grills have several improvements to address the problems of bad casters, higher BTUs and better construction. What Nexgrill is going to find this year is some increasingly strong competition for the low end stainless steel market from Brinkmann. Brinkmann’s Chinese made gas grills are finding their way into everywhere from Wal-Mart to Costco and some of these units are reaching prices as high as $1,600. The inexpensive stainless steel market continues to be a battleground.
