Traeger Pellet Grills

About TRAEGER PELLET GRILLS

Traeger Pellet Grills is a manufacturer of wood pellet grills for outdoor cooking. It offers a range of grills, pellets, sauces, spices, rubs, shakes, accessories, grill covers, and pads.

Pellet grills began in pellet stoves. During the 1973 oil crisis, an increased demand for affordable home heating spearheaded a push toward alternative heat sources, which would later include wood pellets.
Wood pellets were invented in the United States in the late 1970s. They are small, eraser-sized capsules made of compressed sawdust.

In the early 1980s, Jerry Whitfield (a Boeing aviation engineer from Washington) and Joe Traeger (who ran a family-owned heating company in Oregon) both began experimenting with pellet-burning stoves. Powered by electricity, these pellet stoves used a motor-driven auger to transfer a specific amount of pellets from the storage hopper to a fire pot. A fan assisted in combustion and circulated the warm air.

The Traeger pellet grill was created by Joe Traeger in 1985, and it was granted a patent in 1986. Early Traeger Grills employed a three-position controller called an LMH controller that indicated settings for low, medium, and high heat. This controller was also used by many of the pellet grills that were first released after the Traeger patent expired. Each setting roughly corresponds to a temperature range that was attained using a fixed, predefined duty cycle.

As a result of its patent, Traeger was the only manufacturer of pellet grills for twenty years. During that time, the company remained a small family-run business that distributed its pellet grills to a limited network of stores. After Traeger’s patent expired in 2006, other pellet grill companies entered the market with similar technology.
Joe Traeger and his son Brian sold their rights to Traeger Grills to a Florida Venture Capitalist for $12.4 million. In 2014, the Florida firm sold Traeger Grills to the private equity firm Trilantic Capital Partners.

In 2018, Joe and Brian Traeger were hired by Danson’s, which owned several grill companies, including Louisiana Grills and Pit Boss Grills. In 2019, Louisiana Grills announced the hire by unveiling a new line of grills, the Founders Legacy line, and advertisements stated “brought to you proudly by Joe Traeger, the founder of the original pellet grill,” and showed the “Traeger Barn” that had been used in many of Traeger’s advertisements. The new owners sued the Traegers and Dansons for using the barn and promotions involving the Traegers.
[Source: Crunchbase, Wikipedia]