Photograph by Josh Meister
At Big Green Egg, the Atlanta company that makes the cooker with the cute green dimples, they have long known that some of their most sincere product testimonials appear in death notices.
When he started as CEO, Dan Gertsacov set up a Google alert for any mention of “Big Green Egg,” and was amazed how often the cooker appeared in obituaries. “It happens once or twice a month,” he says, tapping his cellphone and opening a database where he keeps track of funerary endorsements. A dearly departed in Springfield, Missouri, loved cooking for his family on his Egg. Another in Williamsburg, Virginia, could grill anything on his Egg. A third, in Augusta, was so skilled on his Egg that he became a recognized “eggspert.” On and on it goes; you’d think the Egg wasn’t a cooking apparatus but a beloved dog or cat, if not a survivor.
“You’ve got 300 words to say something about your loved one, and three of them are ‘Big Green Egg,’” Gertsacov marvels. “People don’t say that about their Nikes or their YETI cooler.”
As Big Green Egg celebrates its 50th birthday this year, the company recognizes that its success has as much to do with its exceptionally devoted fanbase as it does with the cooker itself. They go by the term Eggheads (naturally), and are so taken with their object of affection that they often refer to themselves, unashamedly, as a cult.
Steven Raichlen, the TV barbecue show host and cookbook author, was initially amused by Eggheads and their evangelical fervor. Moonies of barbecue, he called them. But he was converted when he visited Big Green Egg headquarters in Atlanta, which he wrote about in a column headlined, “Raichlen Drinks the Kool-Aid.”
Ed Fisher, the entrepreneur who created the Egg, was puzzled when he first heard the C-word used to characterize the cooker’s following. “I couldn’t decide whether it was good or bad,” he says. “But there really aren’t other words to describe it. If we didn’t call it a cult, I can’t think of another name that fits.”
How did a simple ceramic-lined barbecue cooker become a matter of faith and affinity for so many people?
It has something to do with engineering—there’s a NASA connection—and the early days of the internet. Social identity and game theory play a role. And you can’t underestimate the Egg’s smile-inducing appearance, which could have been a mashup of two other ’70s icons: R2-D2 and Kermit the Frog. Or that silly name that sticks in your mind like an earworm, making otherwise intelligent people spew an endless stream of egg puns (egg-cessories, anyone?).
So let’s start at the beginning, when the Egg came before the chicken, but just barely.
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Only a handful of Atlanta companies are so mindful of their history that they have a museum. The World of Coca-Cola and the Delta Flight Museum are the biggest, and the original Waffle House in Avondale Estates might be the smallest. Then there’s the Big Green Egg museum, part of its corporate office, retail store, and culinary center on an access road near the intersection of I-85 and the Perimeter—you know, Spaghetti Junction. For Eggheads, visiting the mother ship is like going to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. “We see them out front taking selfies,” says Nancy George, the company’s communications director. “The community of Eggheads is the secret sauce of this brand.”
The museum traces the evolution of the Egg, which derived from clay-lined kamados used for centuries to cook rice in Japan. Two dozen specimens fill the display room, from the earliest model (which was green and orange) to the largest one in existence, Eggzilla, said to be big enough to cook two whole hogs, as long as they’re sitting up.
Fisher, now 90, never tires of telling the story of how he came to be the original Egg man. A Philadelphia native who knew nothing about barbecue, he saw servicemen bringing traditional kamados back from Japan and grilling meat with them. Returning to the States after a stint in the navy, he worked as a computer programmer for years, until he got laid off. A friend of his in California was doing well selling pachinko games, a Japanese arcade game that resembles a pinball machine, and invited him to start a similar operation on the East Coast.
Photograph by Ramses Batista, © Big Green Egg
Fisher tried Miami for a while and then settled in Atlanta, where he opened a small store on Clairmont Road in 1974. He called it the Pachinko House, and imported kamados only because he needed something to sell during the slow season for pachinko sales after the holidays. Nobody knew what kamados were, so he fired up one of the cookers and smoked some chicken wings to demonstrate their potential. He sold his first kamado that afternoon. Soon they were outselling the pachinko machines.
Fisher wasn’t sure what to name his novel device. For years, he ran weekly ads in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, peddling “Kamado Barbecue Grills” next to hot buys such as the Skeeter Eater bug zapper. One day in 1982, a newspaper ad salesman pressed him to come up with a better name.
“I’ve heard about companies that do months of research and focus groups to find a name,” Fisher says. “We didn’t do that. I just told the salesman that it was big and green and looked like an egg, and that’s what we went with.”
That name is one of two epiphanies that led to the product we know today. The other occurred during the 1990s, when Fisher decided to improve on the cooker’s fired-clay insulation, which was prone to cracking. He consulted the ceramics department at Georgia Tech. They told him about new materials used to shield space shuttles from heat, and put him in touch with a fabricator in Mexico who made tiles of such material. The Egg went ceramic, making it so durable that the company started offering a limited lifetime guarantee.
As the cooker built a following through the ’90s, its ascent coincided with the rise of the internet. That meant users could connect online and swap recipes and tips, like how to “burp” an Egg, slowly lifting the lid to avoid heat backdrafts. The company noticed the chatter and created an online home for its fans, the Egghead Forum.
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Ray Lampe, a Florida cookbook author who bills himself as “Dr. BBQ,” couldn’t believe the single-minded zeal of the forum’s participants. “The competition barbecue people I knew used different grills,” he says, “but all these people wanted to talk about was the Egg. I couldn’t understand how this cooker could be that life-changing. It’s a pain in the ass because it’s so heavy, and it takes some effort to learn how to cook on it. But these people were worshipping it. I made fun of them; I used to call them ‘Egg-offs’ and ‘Egg-holes.’”
Even so, Lampe tried the Egg and was impressed with its versatility and its ability to hold heat. He ended up working as a Big Green Egg spokesman for 17 years. He bought green clothing, drove a Suburban with green flames on the side, and baked green cakes. “I became an Egghead,” he says. “I got the joke.”
In all his years of doing cooking demos, Lampe noticed something about his audiences. Whenever he asked people what they did for a living, an outsized number were in IT or engineering. The Egg seemed to appeal to smart guys who liked a challenge.
David Morelock, who moved to Atlanta from San Diego to take a job with Big Green Egg as a product leader, used to work in the video game industry and has some thoughts about the cooker’s appeal. “It makes me think of game theory,” he says. “If you want a game to have a passionate following, you can’t make it too easy. There has to be an investment of time to master it. But it can’t be too hard either. You invite people in to form a relationship with the product, and then they’re more inclined to form a relationship with other people who’ve done the same.”
The fact that the Egg takes effort was a draw for Gary Tree, a general contractor in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, with a degree in structural engineering, who founded a cooking team called the Green Man Group. “It checked all the boxes for me,” he says. “It’s well engineered. It’s got those space shuttle materials. It’s a controlled-oxygen system that you have to get the hang of. It’s like driving a semi; you can’t start and stop the heat very quickly.”
Egg lovers like the idea that they’re a little different, that they’re Teslas in a world of Toyotas. In their eyes, the Egg exudes an aura of specialness, if not exclusivity. The price—a large Egg starts at around $1,100—reinforces the cachet.
“You can live in a nice house and drive a nice car, but if people come over and see that Egg sitting there, that’s what they want to talk about,” says Felicia Jordan of the Atlanta cooking team Black Girls Grilling.
Photographs courtesy of Big Green Egg
Eggheads don’t just gather online. They gather at Eggfests—like wine tastings for people who use the cookers—in dozens of locations around the States and overseas. The biggest and oldest one is Eggtoberfest, which will draw several thousand Eggers to Coolray Field in Gwinnett County on October 5.
The event began in an American Legion parking lot in 1998. “It was pretty small, 15 cookers,” says Rodney Deal—aka Mr. Toad—a retired history teacher in Valdese, North Carolina, who has attended every Eggtoberfest. “It wasn’t the company’s idea; it was just something a few of us dreamed up.”
Eggtoberfest has grown to become the ultimate celebration of Egghead culture. Cooking teams dress up in matching outfits, inflatable Eggs bounce around in the breeze, people dye their hair green. There’s even an Eggulance—an ambulance refinished in green that makes promotional appearances, like an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
“Big Green Egg is arguably the first known example of viral marketing on social media,” says Ardy Arani, who succeeded Fisher as company CEO in 2010. “You can’t run a clever advertising campaign and make people feel passionate about something. That happens organically. All we did was help nurture it.”
While there’s definitely a Dragon Con side to Eggtoberfest, most of the people who attend simply love cooking on their Eggs and sampling things others have cooked. Eggheads are particularly proud of the unexpected dishes they create under those green domes, such as Martha Washington’s Custard (Mr. Toad) and smoked oxtails and grits (Black Girls Grilling).
The Egg’s adaptability—it can smoke, grill, or bake—is the main reason chefs are fond of the cooker. Many Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe use Eggs. At The Chastain in Atlanta, they light an Egg five days a week to smoke racks of pork and brisket for pastrami and to grill asparagus, Vidalia onions, and maitake mushrooms over pecan wood. They used their old cooker so much, executive chef Christopher Grossman says, that the outside charred, and began to look like a Big Green-and-Black Egg. They replaced Old Smokey with two bright new models.
“I guess I’m an Egghead, because I like to cook on it,” Grossman says. “But I don’t dress up in green or anything.”
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Big Green Egg is an outlier among grill makers. It remains privately owned and has no plans to go public or sell out to a conglomerate or venture capital partnership, as Weber, Traeger, and other brands have. You can’t buy an Egg at The Home Depot or other big-box stores; the company decided early on that its cooker required instruction, so it’s sold only at places that specialize in hands-on sales, such as Ace Hardware.
Before Gertsacov, the new CEO, joined the company, he was working in South America with McDonald’s and looking to add a kamado-style cooker to his grill collection. His research led him to the Big Green Egg and its Egghead community.
“We’re going to double down on what brought us here, and it’s that community of Eggheads,” he says. “We’re going to grow and connect it.” He’s talking about appealing more to women and minority groups, and about marketing to areas where the Egg doesn’t have a strong following like it does in the Southeast. The cooker hasn’t made much of a splash on the West Coast, and while it’s sold in more than 50 countries, there are many other lands out there with potential Eggheads.
Photographs courtesy of Big Green Egg
As Big Green Egg grows, Lampe, its former spokesman, wonders whether the franchise can maintain its mystique. “They’ve been the cool-guy grill for a long time,” he says. “But it’s tough to keep that going.” He thinks Traeger, which popularized pellet grills that cook with wood pellets automatically fed into a firebox, has replaced the Egg as the next object of desire for barbecue techies.
Maybe so. But few if any outdoor cookers enjoy the brand loyalty of Big Green Egg. “I can’t think of another grill that’s inspired such an emotional connection,” Steven Raichlen says. “That shape and color are so endearing.”
Big Green Egg employees feel the love every time they walk out in public wearing a logo shirt. It’s an open invitation for total strangers to start a conversation about their big green babies.
Jerry Stone, the company’s manager of business development, has experienced the phenomenon dozens of times. Once, when he was boarding a Delta overseas flight, a flight attendant noticed the logo on his shirt and pulled out a phone to show him all the yummy things she had cooked on her Egg.
“We were boarding the plane and getting ready to take off,” he says, “and it was like she was showing me pictures of her family.”
Many Eggheads, no doubt with a touch of irony, do regard their cookers almost like kin. Some carry that connection through to the end. When it came time to dispose of his first Egg, Fred Van Patten, a member of the Green Man Group cooking team from Cumming, invited his neighbors over for a “Bury the Egg” service. “We blessed it with bourbon,” he says.
It was the least he could do for a loved one.
Then he went out and bought another Egg.
Big-name Eggheads
Jimmy Fallon. During the writers strike last year, the Tonight Show host posted videos of himself cooking on an Egg and made up a little ditty: It’s a Big Green Egg, it’s a Big Green Egg, it’s got a big green mouth and four little legs.
Mark Zuckerberg. When the Meta mogul went on Facebook Live to cook on his Egg, Eater called him a “barbecue nerd.”
Peter Griffin. Family Guy’s titular character goes to a friend’s house for a cookout on his “big green grill”—only it isn’t a cookout. His friend invited Peter just to help him move the heavy smoker a single inch.
Meghan Markle. The American member of British royalty shared photos of herself making fish tacos on a Big Green Egg for dinner with Prince Harry.
Henry Cavill. The British actor best known for playing Superman in several movies loves his Egg and has posted photos of himself baking pizza on it.
Dave Grohl. The founder of the Foo Fighters did a piece for Bon Appétit comparing his obsession with his Big Green Egg to his love of music.
Homer Simpson. In a 2015 episode of The Simpsons, the aroma of barbecue cooking on Homer’s Egg-like Hive Smoker attracts people from all over Springfield—and a TV chef, who challenges him to a cook-off.
Martha Stewart. The lifestyle maven likes to cook on her Egg and once hosted a party for her company built around Egg-smoked fare.
David Beckham. The soccer superstar boasts about his Big Green Egg—but he also cooks on the Egg’s main competitor, Kamado Joe.
Guy Fieri. When the controversial Food Network star was pictured in Parade magazine cooking on his Egg, someone on the Egghead Forum said, “That does it. I’m selling mine.”
This article appears in our October 2024 issue.
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