Keeping backyard grillmasters connected, from prep to plate

Traeger Grills invented the original wood-fired grill more than 30 years ago and has led the category ever since as the world’s top-selling wood-fired grill brand. Based in Salt Lake City, Traeger exists to bring people together over really good food, helping backyard cooks grill low and slow with less guesswork and more confidence. In 2019, Traeger extended that mission into the digital world, launching smart grills with patented WiFIRE technology that connect directly to the Traeger app.

As Traeger’s smart grills took off, the IoT platform behind them was being sunset out from under them. Vervint partnered with Traeger to migrate their entire connected product ecosystem to AWS without disrupting a single customer’s cook, then stayed on to help launch Traeger’s next generation of connected grills.

Racing the clock on a sunsetting platform

Traeger’s smart grills, launched in 2019 with patented WiFIRE technology, took off faster than almost anyone expected. But the IoT platform running underneath them was being sunset, leaving Traeger with a fast-growing base of customers who expected their connected grills to keep working without interruption.

Traeger needed a partner who could migrate a live, high-stakes connected product to a new platform without customers ever noticing a difference. They 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.

A faster, more resilient way to migrate

Vervint’s answer was the IoT Foundation, a proprietary layer built on top of AWS IoT that lets connected products migrate, or launch, faster and on more stable footing. Rather than treating the migration as a one-time lift-and-shift, Vervint used the IoT Foundation to move hundreds of thousands of grills onto AWS with zero disruption to the customers already grilling with them.

Speed mattered as much as stability. Working against a hard deadline, Vervint helped Traeger cut six months off the original migration timeline by building on the IoT Foundation’s already-proven components rather than starting from scratch. Once live, the new platform also proved dramatically more efficient: cost per device dropped from more than $6 to just $0.32, a 94% reduction, while cloud costs overall fell 80%, both delivering savings well past launch day.

With capacity now available on demand through AWS, Traeger could scale to meet demand without worrying about its infrastructure keeping pace.

Building for what came next

Smarter grilling, hands especially free. With the new platform live, Vervint helped Traeger add Google and Alexa voice skills, letting customers control their grills and pull up recipes and cook cycles hands-free, extending the cooking experience beyond the grill itself.

A platform ready for Timberline. With a scalable IoT foundation now in place, Traeger engaged Vervint again, this time to help develop and launch the new Timberline Series. As Traeger’s primary AWS platform vendor, Vervint provided strategic direction on firmware over-the-air updates and telemetry data ingestion, improved live service monitoring, and built a user-friendly web portal for Traeger’s engineers and developers to manage device configuration, firmware updates, users, and more.

Traeger launched the Timberline Series with confidence that its platform could handle new users, more traffic, and greater complexity, all while improving security and continuing to save on cloud costs.

With a modern, scalable IoT foundation and a partner invested in more than just the technology, Traeger is set up to keep pushing wood-fired grilling forward, connecting new products and new features to an ever-growing base of backyard cooks, and staying true to their mission of bringing people together over really good food.