The Summit Charcoal wasn’t marketed heavy at all. Most people simply didn’t know it existed, or scoffed at a $1500 grill that at first blush looked like a $110 kettle sitting next to it. Unless you knew…
Actual pellet innovation someone said. That’s exactly what Smokefire is/was when it came out. To this day, it’s the odd man out in design in terms of having Flavorizer bars and an open chamber. Almost everything else has a grease tray. The product off Smokefire IS better than nearly anything else on the market.
You can’t innovate a kettle. You can tweak things like vents and add things like thermometers and different ash pans and such, but it’s a kettle. There is no innovation to a perfect cooker.
We know we’re getting a new pellet. We’re likely getting some tweaks to the smart gas grills which, whatever. Doesn’t float my boat, if I were in the market and it had that, fine. But not going to get me into a new grill. I have to assume the new Q is debuting here, a new griddle, and maybe a new kamado style which could be cool.
I know folks want Weber to innovate, as that’s what they “were built on”. But realistically, Weber had the perfect cooker in a market that had relatively little competition for 40-50 years. The kettle has been the game in charcoal for its entire life, and remains so. The only competition the kettle has is those garbage cheap square units at big box stores, and direct rip offs like the SNS. If you can’t beat it, copy it, add a leg and some other gimmicks and try your hand. That just proves the perfection that is the kettle. Long live the king.
Weber really innovated gas as well, I’ve never used a gasser other than a Weber but I look at other options and most are cheap junk that will cook and that’s about it. I’ve heard the horror stories of using early gassers with lava rocks and such. Weber came in, produced the legendary Genesis line and made a gasser actually a viable cooker.
Today’s market is flush with competition. Weber being the market leader, the big fish in a small pond, was established as the Cadillac of gassers. Being a large corporation it was only a matter of time when they looked to decrease production costs and maximize profits; that’s literally all a corporation exists for. So we have good gassers today that will almost certainly never live long lives like the original Genesis, and there’s very little innovation in gassers.
I figure there’s very little innovation left. The proven designs are known and from there it’s essentially slapping lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig, and nothing wrong with that. Love me some bacon!
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