Optimizing to Support Connected Products

About Traeger Grills

Salt Lake City, Utah-based Traeger Grills invented the original wood-fired grill over 30 years ago. They continue to lead the industry as the world’s top-selling wood-fired grill, helping outdoor cooks grill slow and low. 

Traeger launched their smart grills with patented WiFIRE technology in 2019, connecting customers to their grill through the Traeger app.  

“One of our goals is to bring people together over really good food and to make that process simple, so you are building memories,” said Bart Strong, Traeger’s Director of Digital Technologies. 

Traeger’s app lets customers monitor and adjust cooking temperatures from their chaise lounge instead of being tethered to the grill, plus access a library of hundreds of recipes that download directly to the grill. 

A New Platform for a Classic Appliance

With a sudden market adoption of their connected grills coupled with a sunsetting of their Xively IoT platform, Traeger Grills needed to find a partner who would help with their connected product migration without disrupting their growing customer base. 

When Traeger sought a new partner to migrate their IoT platform and support sales of their smart wood-fired grills, they knew Vervint would get the job done right and done fast. 

Worry-Free Connected Product Migration

Vervint collaborated with Traeger to migrate and optimize their platform and support connected products. This project’s primary focus was a connected product migration, moving to the AWS IoT Platform with the help of Vervint’s proprietary IP, The IoT Foundation. The IoT Foundation is a layer that sits on top of the AWS IoT Platform, allowing customers to create or migrate their connected products faster. 

Vervint migrated hundreds of thousands of grills to the new platform with no disruptions to the end user’s service. And with the AWS platform, this growth in capacity is available on demand, allowing Traeger to scale as needed.  

One of the greatest challenges was the time constraints to move Traeger to the new IoT platform. Using the IoT Foundation, Traeger was able to cut the schedule back six months and lower risk since it is built on stable components. Now, Traeger can continue to meet the demands of its large, steadily growing customer base and evolve their IoT platform for their future product needs. 

The IoT migration had additional benefits for Traeger as well! Not only did we complete the migration six months faster than originally planned, we also helped them achieve an 80% reduction in cloud costs. 

Additionally, as the business had grown, the cost per device had risen to over $6 per device. The migration boosted efficiency and scalability, bringing cost per device down to $0.32 – a 94% reduction that will benefit Traeger on an ongoing basis. 

Scalability and Growth

In addition to the migration, Traeger gained velocity from running their platform on AWS while also increasing security and support because the pervasive security model throughout AWS is well-managed and configured. AWS offers scalability and growth potential and the ability to take the information Trager gathers to the next level to improve the process for customers. 

Plus, Vervint helped Traeger with a little something extra to improve customer satisfaction — voice applications. We helped Traeger implement Google and Alexa voice skills to interact with their grills. The ecosystem provides content like recipes and cook cycles that give customers a broader cooking experience.

Helping Launch Additional Products: Traeger’s Timberline Series

After building an IoT platform that enabled Traeger to grow and scale seamlessly, Traeger engaged Vervint to develop their new Timberline Series. The product featured new capabilities that would directly impact end users and the digital experience.

As Traeger’s primary AWS platform vendor, Vervint delivered additional business value by providing strategic direction related to firmware over-the-air (OTA) updates and telemetry data ingestion. With future maintainability and reduction of technical debt in mind, we improved live service monitoring systems and built a user-friendly web portal for engineers and developers to better manage device configuration, firmware updates, users, and more.

With this work complete, Traeger launched the new Timberline Series with confidence that their IoT platform could accommodate new users, increased traffic, and additional complexity while improving security, reducing uncertainty, and saving on cloud costs.

1. 94% lower cost per device

2. 80% reduction in cloud costs 

3. 6 months ahead of schedule 

Beyond Great Tech

Just as Traeger supports backyard grillers from prep to plate, they needed a tech partner who could innovate and collaborate at every step of their connected product migration. 

Traeger chose Vervint because they saw an opportunity to create meaningful impact for their customers that went beyond great tech – to truly make a difference in their lives and leisure.   

In Vervint, Traeger found a strategic partner committed to helping them create impactful solutions for their customers and differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market. Like ribs cooked to perfection on a Traeger grill, it’s partnership “well done.”