Click here to sign-up to receive the newsletter every week in your email in-box.
It’s the dead of winter here in Michigan, but grill companies are starting to think about spring. We covered three new releases this week.
Starting with the one that I’m most excited about, Nexgrill teased a new hybrid grill called the Oakford 1150 Pro. It’s a 3-burner gas grill (with a griddle) on one side and an offset smoker on the other. It will be a Home Depot exclusive, and we managed to get full details on it.
The Nexgrill Ora pizza oven that we had been anticipating has been released, and is for sale at Home Depot too. What makes this pizza oven unique is it has a smoker box on the top of it and a manually rotating pizza stone.
Pit Boss released a sleek new pellet grill this week. The Savannah Onyx Edition is matte black and looks great. It’s huge, offering 1,507 square inches of cooking spaces and also has an easy ash clean out. It’s being sold exclusively at Walmart.
If you’re looking for a new Country Smokers product, you will have to look at the website for Pit Boss. It appears that parent company Dansons has all but discontinued the brand. The Country Smokers website is a redirect to Pit Boss, and there are just 3 different Country Smokers grills for sale there.
Blackstone released a new pizza oven last week, and also has been filing quite a few trademarks. They have trademarks for pretty much every outdoor lifestyle accessory you could think of at this point. Also, a surprising one is they filed for a trademark for griddle toys.
On the retail side, Academy Sports is continuing to open stores and expand to new places. They announced a new store in Lafayette, IN and are on pace to reach their goal of 80 – 100 new stores by 2026.
Vista Outdoor is gearing up to split their company in two. As part of that, they want to keep their Chief Accounting Officer around. They signed him up to a retention agreement with $200k worth of shares.
Vista Outdoor is also the first outdoor cooking company to schedule earnings for the quarter. They will be releasing earnings on February 1st after the market closes, with a call the following morning.
Over at Weber, as we previously reported, their CFO is leaving. He still had a good amount of time on his employment agreement, so it was surprising that he’d resign. This week there was an SEC filing that shows he’s now going to receive a separation payment of $375k. That makes us curious if it wasn’t a voluntary resignation afterall.
Finally this week we posted a review of the Solo Stove Bonfire 2.0 fire pit. As expected, we really like it. It’s unfortunately created quite an addiction to accessories for it. They make it really versatile and are incredibly hard to resist buying.