We had a strong intuition that the UK outdoor cooking market was growing and that live-fire cooking specifically was underserved. Intuition isn’t a business case. In the summer of 2021, we did the research to find out whether the numbers supported what we were seeing in our own cooking circles.
What the Market Data Showed
The UK BBQ market was worth approximately £1.1 billion and growing year-on-year. That figure alone wasn’t the interesting part — we already knew the market was large. What mattered was where the growth was happening.
Gas grilling still dominated in terms of total units, with around 65% of UK households owning a BBQ of some kind. But charcoal was growing at roughly 15% year-on-year. Live fire cooking — wood, embers, offset smokers, open fire — was the fastest-growing segment within that. Outdoor kitchens as a category were growing at 40% year-on-year. The pandemic had accelerated all of these trends as people invested in their gardens and outdoor spaces.
The Gap the Numbers Revealed
The gap wasn’t between demand and supply of outdoor cooking equipment in general. There’s no shortage of BBQ equipment in the UK market. The gap was between the size of the serious fire cooking segment and the quality of specialist kit available to it. The mainstream market was built for casual gas grillers. The specialist live-fire segment — people doing proper long cooks, wood-fired grilling, asado-style cooking — was largely making do with kit designed for a different use case.
That’s a specific and addressable gap. Not “people want better BBQ stuff” in the abstract, but “a defined and growing group of UK cooks is underserved by the specialist kit market.” Those two things are very different propositions.
Validating the Decision
The data confirmed what our own experience had already suggested: the market for what we were building was real. It wasn’t a niche so small it couldn’t sustain a brand, and it wasn’t so crowded that differentiation would be impossible. The outdoor cooking numbers validated our conviction. The product still had to be right — numbers don’t sell a mediocre apron — but they confirmed the direction was sound.
We pressed ahead with the brief and the material selection. The Gaucho BBQ Grill Apron was the result.
