The battle for grill sales aren’t just fought in the backyard anymore. They’re also fought in the pocket, where grill apps are touted and sought after by consumers.
As we noted when Nexgrill released their connected grill app, we’re at a point where grill companies are spending more on software than hardware. Traeger CEO, Jeremy Andrus, noted this in an interview last year.
I would say we have kind of hit that inflection point. To be fair, some of it goes back to our strategy. Over time, hardware innovation slows down. You certainly see that in handheld devices. You can only take things so far. ThEn it is the content and the software that really facilitate the differentiated experience.
We spend a lot of money on both sides. We still have a lot of innovation in the durable, hardware piece. The reality is that a connected product has a lot of investment in server capacity, in software development, and in content development. It is always evolving. You launch a new grill and maybe you have three or four years of useful life. You launch a version of your app, and the next month you are doing it again. You are always pushing the content piece, which is where we probably invest the most. That is ultimately what changes the experience. The model is expensive, but we think it is important.
Jeremy Andrus, CEO of Traeger
In that ever evolving software model, Weber has just released a redesign of the WEBER CONNECT app.
It’s a sleek looking app that offers a number of upgrades over the previous version.
- Graphing – Users can graph the temperature from their cook. Each smart grill and Hub can handle up to 12 recipes and timers simultaneously. The app also lets users analyze thier cook data or share status updates through data exporting.
- Recipes – The new app has more than 800 preloaded recipes, with a growing library. 350 of those recipes will walk users through them step-by-step, and include short videos.
- Grill Support – The redesigned app can handle multiple grills simultaneously.
- Accessibility – Users can adjust font size to make the app easier to read, or add voiceover.
We’ve created a custom guided grilling experience for our owners, which includes a new dashboard, feature sets, functionality, and content that span from beginner cooks to expert grillers. For example, a cook using more than one grill can now track and monitor what’s happening on their SMOKEFIRE® wood fired pellet grill while cooking a different meal on their WEBER GENESIS® gas grill. Or for our more advanced grillers, new precision cook graphing visually charts the progress of a cook by the second
Nikhil Bhogal, Senior Vice President, Technology and Connected Devices at Weber