Somewhere between the hardware store and the soccer field your kid is playing on, a brisket is sitting in a smoker. It cost a hundred dollars, and it's been on since early morning. The cook has no idea how it's doing.
That specific, domestic, slightly anxious problem is what FireBoard was designed to solve.
Ted Conrad spent fourteen years in the investment world before he ever thought about thermometers. His work was building automated trading systems, the kind of software architecture that had to be accurate down to the millisecond. Time series databases. Servers deployed at stock exchanges. These were systems that could not afford to guess.
Then a neighbor got him a deal on a Traeger, the popular pellet grill, and Ted learned to smoke meat. Almost immediately, he noticed something missing.
"Why can't I monitor this remotely?" he says. "Everybody's busy on the weekends. You're cooking something, you're going to a kid's sports game, you're going to the store. You should be able to track what you're cooking right there on your phone."
In 2014, nothing simple existed. The cloud-connected options that were out there required, as Ted puts it, almost a network engineer to figure out. So he started building. He and co-founder Steven Briggeman launched FireBoard out of Kansas City in 2016. It’s a smart thermometer that connects via WiFi or Bluetooth, monitors up to six probes at once, logs every cook to the cloud, and lets you check in from anywhere. Take it out of the box, connect, and you're up and running in two or three minutes.
What Ted was really building, though, wasn't just a remote thermometer. It was a chain of trust.
"If we're going to tell somebody your chicken's at 160, 162," he says, "how do you believe that the actual reading you're getting is accurate?"
Ted’s engineered remarkable accuracy. Every FireBoard unit goes through a methodical process of testing, calibrating, and rechecking before it ships. Several products include calibration certificates, and the chain of verification behind those certificates traces all the way back to NIST, the federal agency where 50 degrees is, by definition, actually 50 degrees.
"There's a whole chain of trust," Ted says. "Every unit’s calibration can be traced back to NIST standards, including our test equipment which have been sent off and calibrated. So we have the ability to tell the customer: your device is NIST calibrated."
This is what Ted carried from the investment world into the kitchen. In finance, you build systems that have to be not probably correct, not mostly correct, but provably correct. The discipline of verification, the refusal to approximate, translated directly into hardware. What changed was the stakes. Instead of a derivatives portfolio, it's a brisket.
But to the person standing over that smoker, the stakes feel just as real.
In 2019, FireBoard brought their circuit board assembly in-house, setting up a full manufacturing line in their Kansas City facility in under three months. It was partly a supply chain decision; their outside contractor kept slipping deadlines, and FireBoard was about to run out of product. But it became something more.
"We kind of like getting our hands dirty," Ted says.
For a company whose product is invisible—cloud infrastructure, firmware, wireless signals—that instinct toward the physical is telling. FireBoard designs the hardware, writes the software, assembles the boards, handles customer service, and ships from the same building. Ted calls it being vertically integrated. What it actually means is that when something is wrong, there's nowhere to point but inward.
The customers seem to feel this. People on his customer service team consistently remark how unusual their job is… because callers tend to be happy.
"People will call and be like, Ted, I love your product. I need to figure this one thing out, but I love your product." He still answers phones occasionally; who wouldn’t when calls like that are coming in? He also texts back and forth with customers, regularly sending feature ideas.
The product has expanded considerably since that first model. It's a full ecosystem now, including the Pulse, a recently launched dual-band wireless probe that solved the connectivity problems common to wireless thermometers by embedding two radio frequencies in one stainless steel tube.
FireBoard's products range from backyard smokers to restaurant cold storage monitoring. But the customers who find Ted most tend to be people like him: people who love technology, love cooking, and find satisfaction in the overlap.
Ted runs. He gets outside. And he smokes meat. So he keeps his phone in his pocket on weekends, and checks on cooks from wherever he happens to be.
"If our products can help solve a simple problem," he says, "make somebody's life just a little bit easier — that's what I'm trying to do."
So enjoy your kid’s soccer game. Engage in a little small talk at the hardware store. Because you can trust FireBoard.
Ted Conrad’s made sure of that.
For more on how Fireboard can take your barbecuing into the future, visit fireboard.com