Back in 2017, we brought you the story of Grill Pinz, a grilling product designed by a Sanford man which allow outdoor cooks to attach bacon to other pieces of meat.
At the time, creator Dan Cranston, a U.S. Army veteran and safety consultant who has lived in the Deep River area for more than 20 years, had just completed a Kickstarter campaign to launch the product, which he conceived after realizing that toothpicks – typically used in recipes calling for bacon-wrapped meat – frequently burn on the grill, or worse, present a choking hazard.
The product has been commercially available ever since Cranston and team met their Kickstarter goal in 2017.
Now, 18 months later, Cranston is gearing up to release a new iteration of the product, which is available for pre-sale (doing so gets buyers a 50 percent discount) on the company’s website.
The new design allows for custom colors and logos, and now the company is looking to expand and work with retailers in other parts of the country, including on the west coast.
“Version one has been a great success, but the design needed improvement,” Cranston said, explaining that while he was obtaining quotes for design enhancement he realized that the original stainless steel used in production presented limitations and as such he needed to consider using a different material.
That material ended up being a specialty synthetic produced by a company in Kernersville, N.C. Cranston located that company with the help of the Manufacturing Solution Center in Conover, giving him the ability to move production from Chicago to North Carolina.
Watch the original Grill Pinz pitch video below:
I love those! They look so cool and I love that they won’t burn or splinter like a toothpick, I hope to get some for personal use! If I could customize them they would be perfect. Thanks for the post. Finding this blog is the second best thing about living in NC!