As we’ve covered before, the pandemic caused explosive growth in the outdoor cooking space. Recently at Weber and Traeger, we’ve seen the effects of demand returning to normal coupled with other economic factors. It’s likely that privately held Dansons is experiencing those effects as well, but through an SEC filing, we get a look at just how explosive the growth was.
While Dansons has various businesses, the are probably most known as the parent company of grill companies Pit Boss, Louisiana Grills and Country Smokers. Through those brands they offer a variety of smokers, grills, griddles and even a fire pit.
Through the consumer effects of the pandemic they had sales go from around $210 million in 2019 to $365 million 2020 with $43 million in earnings, excluding taxes and non-cash items. That’s an eye-popping 70% growth in a mature industry. We also know that Dansons had $52.7 million in earnings in the twelve months leading up to the uncovered SEC filing from the summer of 2021. That’s even more impressive when you consider that Dansons had $6.4 million in net sales in 2013.
These crazy growth numbers weren’t limited to Pit Boss. Weber, which celebrated its 70th anniversary this year, saw 23% sales growth in 2020 and another 25% in 2021. That’s extremely high growth for an old brand that already has a 43% market share.
Traeger grew 50% from 2019 to 2020 with sales of $546 million and another 44% in 2021 with $786 million in sales. Finally, newcomer Blackstone grew 92% in 2020 to $293 million and another 65% in 2021. Unlike industry stalwart Weber, at least some of Traeger and Blackstone’s growth can be attributed to innovation and basically creating a new segment in Blackstone’s case.
We’ll see where the outdoor cooking market ends up when everything settles. It’s clear at this point though that the effects from the pandemic were an anomaly.