Meet Christopher Huang | CEO – Brisk It Labs, Inc.

We had the good fortune of connecting with Christopher Huang and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Christopher, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?

I’ve always loved eating BBQ. Little beats the first bite into a piece of beef that’s been smoked for 8, 10, sometimes 12+ hours! Cooking BBQ is fun too, but unfortunately that time commitment and energy needed conflicts heavily with the reality of day to day life responsibilities.

This is why when pellet grills arrived onto the scene, I was incredibly excited by the ease of using one to make great BBQ. My technology background immediately came to the idea of a smart, network connected bbq grill and all the potential possibilities such a device would unlock. However, while pellet grills made the fire management aspect much easier, and wifi connected grills did get released, they did not fully achieve the modern day, hands-free BBQ grilling experience I thought they would. Innovation in the grill space started to feel stagnant: some thicker metal there, a bottle opener here – smart technology and automation really felt like an after thought. There was so much more that could be done – how cool would be to have a bbq grill that could truly do everything itself?!

It was at that point where my odd background combination of Silicon Valley tech and BBQ industry experience became a natural fit to making such an idea become reality. And so the concept of Brisk It’s smart bbq grill was formed. I wanted to design, develop, and build the most advanced, intelligent, and automated BBQ grill out there so even the most novice of chefs could enjoy the flavors of a wood smoked bbq meal with the push of a button.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Brisk It is what happens when traditional American barbecue meets Silicon Valley high-tech innovation. We are a smart barbecue grill company that combines IoT capabilities, digital innovation, and delicious wood smoked barbecuing into an advanced but accessible wood pellet grill. Our vision is to have a fully automated, “one-click” end-to-end grilling experience. WiFi connectivity, A.I. driven automated cooking, and algorithm controlled fires are just a few of the innovative paths we are taking to realize this.

While the idea of wifi BBQ grills is nothing new, it has always been a secondary consideration for the current grills out there. Instead of fully leveraging the power of modern day connected technology, most grills were focusing on marginal forms of innovation that ultimately did not impact the food results or the ease of achieving said food results. Furthermore, these minute improvements were often used as a reason to continuously increase the price of grills with each new release. When Brisk It was conceptualized, we promised ourselves that we would go down a different path.

There is a common saying that developing software is easy (not quite true), but hardware is hard (VERY true), and at Brisk It, we had to do both. This means we have to design and manufacture an entirely new grill from sheet metal, engineer a state of the art electronic controller that can withstand the outdoors, build an app that is both capable yet user friendly, and construct the cloud infrastructure needed to support this whole solution. I won’t go too much into the details, but this was a monumental challenge for our small but crackshot team. It took us 2 years of development, 14 prototypes, and a limited Early Access launch to get our first grill fully ready for the public. There were definitely some hard lessons along the way. How do we make our algorithms intelligent enough to manage the fire burning inside the grill in a manner that generates excellent smoke but also temperature stability? How should our automated cooking intelligence account for variations in cooking styles, ingredients, or even human error? How do we ensure that our high resolution LCD control panel can endure the stress of rain, grease, and smoke experienced outdoors? And once we had all those figured out, we discovered that much of our packaging had issues sustaining the impacts of e-commerce shipping, necessitating a complete overhaul of our package structure design.

But despite all these challenges, the team at Brisk It was able to overcome them. We now have our first smart grill available for purchase by the public! The Origin Series grill (https://briskitgrills.com/collections/all/products/the-brisk-it-grill) is a self-cooking grill that can cook your 6 hour pork ribs from start to finish in a single push of a button. It can adapt to a wide variety of behaviors, such as a user preferring to wrap their food mid-cook versus not wrapping, or whether they like to modify temperatures or let the A.I. do everything for them, and more. We can confidently say that the Brisk It Origin Series grill is the most adaptive and intelligent grill out there, but despite that, we only consider this the beginning. As we progress toward building out the self learning and adaptive capabilities of the grill, the Brisk It grill will only get smarter from here!

Of course, Brisk It is still small. We definitely still have a long ways to go, and in a space dominated by publicly traded companies and powerful existing players, it’s not going to be easy. However, we hope that our relentless focus on disruptive innovation can give us the edge needed to succeed!

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
For someone who has never been to LA, I would definitely recommend a balanced itinerary that dabbles a little into sightseeing, food, and SoCal’s unique culture.

Firstly, LA landmarks such as the Getty museum, Venice Beach, Rodeo Drive, and the Santa Monica pier are always bucket list sight seeing items for a first time visit to the area. However, I personally found the Botanical Gardens at Huntington Library an incredible but often overlooked attraction to view.

Next would be to get the appetite satiated, and you can never go wrong with a visit to Korea town for Korean BBQ. It’s not just for the delicious meat, but the atmosphere is full of energy. If you want to go a bit more upscale, Parks BBQ is the pick, while Quarters is the place you want to be for a bit more value. Both are winners however. Street tacos are also an LA hallmark that I would never pass up – my personal go-to is Brothers Cousins Tacos. Finally, if one wants to go high end fancy European, an Italian pasta at Il Pastaio in Beverly hills is always a must visit once in a while.

Finally, I would be amiss if I let a friend come to SoCal without recommending Universal Studios or Disney Land (or both) to them. While their Floridian counterparts are bigger and grander, there’s something about being where those studios started that gives the California parks their charm.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have been guided by so many positive influences in my life. I’ve had caring friends, wise and talented business mentors, and more than one difficult co-worker who grated my nerves at the time but I later look back and realize how much I learned from them.

With that said, when it comes to Brisk It’s story, I have two groups of individuals that I would like to recognize specifically.

First are the wonderful folks at one of my previous positions, a supply chain SaaS startup called Elementum. That gig was one full of ups and downs, to the say the least. From working on the biggest deals and integrations in the industry to experiencing the growing pains of a company trying to solve a trillion dollar problem. Elementum and its team taught me so much. At Elementum, I got to work on a highly technical product in a variety of roles, and it gained me much of the skills and knowledge that have been instrumental in our efforts to grow Brisk It. Whether it’s how to manage and grow a tech start up, how to pitch to Fortune 500 executives, and, building a complex technology product, I am so thankful I got the full 360 learning experience with Elementum.

Second would be the current team at Brisk It. Brisk It’s smart BBQ grill is a highly complex product. Everything from the industrial sheet metal, to the electronics, to the cloud infrastructure and mobile is designed and developed in house. It goes without saying that this requires a diverse and incredibly talented team. First off, talented designers Shey and Alex pulled off an incredible design of Brisk It’s industrial design and our mobile app to make them look unique and truly world class. Brisk It’s CTO Yongjin is a Machine Learning and AI engineering master – we could almost say that Brisk It’s brain is his brain! These are just a couple of the incredible professionals Brisk It’s been fortunate to work with, but these guys were there in the beginning so I feel especially indebted to them.

While Brisk It is just getting started, and we have way more to show in the future, without these folks, we would not have a smart bbq grill on the market as we do now.

Website: https://briskitgrills.com/

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