There aren’t too many “start-ups” in the outdoor cooking space. There are plenty of small companies with great ideas, but not many go the traditional start-up route of raising funding through multiple series and building new hardware.
Investors far prefer software, it requires minimal assets to create and it isn’t nearly as expensive to sell and scale. The rapid growth during the Pandemic fueled grill boom was a perfect opportunity to create an exception to that.
Spark Grills was an innovative company that emerged during that time offering something different for charcoal grilling. They had a sleek looking grill which was front and center to a more mass appeal.
They created proprietary charcoal blocks, called Briqs, that had different variations for different types of cooking. They also had app controlled connecting cooking, so you could control temperature, and your cook, while still cooking with charcoal.
It was a great idea, and Spark Grills rode the wave of of all the Covid growth in outdoor cooking. Unfortunately, that wave came crashing down right after Spark Grills had scaled up, so the company went out of business.
Apparently, that wasn’t the end of the story for Spark Grills. While no press release was issued on it, Charbroil acquired Spark Grills as they were going out of business.
A corporate acquisition comes in two main forms, an asset purchase or an equity purchase. In an equity purchase, the buyer takes over the seller completely. In the more common asset purchase, the buyer just buys the assets (real assets or intellectual property) they want from the seller.
Charbroil performed an asset purchase of Spark Grills, as you can see from the assignment page above that transfers the trademarks from Spark Grills to Charbroil. We don’t know if or how many actual grills or other real assets that Charbroil bought, but we know they bought their patents, which is the most valuable piece of Spark Grills.
Also in the above image, you can see it’s dated February 27, 2023. That means the acquisition happened a little while ago, and right when Spark Grills was in major financial distress.
We don’t know what, Charbroil will do with what they bought from Spark Grills. It would be great to see Charbroil apply their R&D and manufacturing resources to the Spark Grill and come out with a new product. The Spark Grill was a great idea after all, it just was a casualty of the boom and bust from the Pandemic.
A side story from all this is that W.C. Bradley Co., the parent company of Charbroil, was a big winner from the Pandemic. I’m sure they had their share of financial challenges from it, but it allowed them to buy Pit Boss’s parent company, Dansons, and Spark Grills.
They have their legacy brands, Charbroil, Oklahoma Joe’s and SABER, their new electric grill brand Current Backyard, and their acquired brands, Dansons and Spark Grills. That gives them arguably the most diverse and innovative portfolio on the market.