Aloha Friends! Here's The Kona Story...
We're Jamie and Jamie Harris.
Yes, we're both named Jamie. It's been the running joke of the brand since we started Kona out of our garage in 2014, and it still trips people up at trade shows. We've stopped trying to fix it.
The first thing we ever made was the Kona BBQ grill mat. People liked it. They told their friends. Pretty soon the garage couldn't hold the orders, and we were shipping out of warehouses across the country and into Europe and Asia. Twelve years in, Kona's grown into a full BBQ accessories company. The 120% Service Guarantee is still the promise on every box.
But the most important thing we've ever made isn't a mat. It's the bag of wood pellets that fixed a problem we kept hearing about for years.
Why we got into wood pellets
Pellet-grill owners kept telling us the same thing: the flavor isn't what it used to be. They were right. They were also blaming the wrong thing. The problem isn't the pellet format. It's what's actually inside the pellet. And once one of us (the polymer chemist of the two of us, you'll meet him in a minute) started digging into the industry, the problem was hard to unsee.
What we found out about pellets
Three patterns in the industry. They're worth naming, because once you know them, you stop falling for the bag.
The flavored-base pattern. Some of the biggest pellet brands hold patents that let them sell pellets where the bag says cherry, mesquite, or hickory, but inside, the pellets are predominantly a cheap base wood (often oak or alder) flavored with wood oils. The "cherry" flavor isn't cherry wood. It's a wood-oil additive on a base. Some manufacturers can do this legally, others can't, and the bag almost never tells you which it is.
The sawdust pattern. A lot of manufacturers buy industrial sawdust as a byproduct from lumber mills, furniture factories, and tool-handle makers, then press it into pellets. The wood is young. Hickory used for hammer handles is about 20 years old. Hickory in competition pits is 80 to 120. Younger wood means less lignin, less heartwood, less flavor. The economics are brutal: roughly 20,000 pounds of sawdust costs about $150, and you can press it into 40-pound bags selling for $4 each. Most of the bag is wood waste, and you can taste it.
The young-tree pattern. "100% apple" or "100% hickory" pellets that technically tell the truth, but use trees too small or too retired to make boards. High bark-to-heartwood ratio. Less lignin. Less flavor. Often the wood is so soft it needs to be blended with a denser species just to burn properly.
None of those three patterns are illegal. They're business decisions that put margin ahead of flavor. Knowing they existed is what made it impossible for one of us to keep working in paint.
Meet the team behind the wood
We're both Jamie Harris. We know.
One of us spent a decade as a polymer chemist and technical manager at Fortune 500 companies before Kona. He ran the exterior-paints program at Glidden, working with test fences, independent labs, and Consumer Reports. He managed the international paint division across Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Bermuda. Every paint Glidden sold at Walmart came through that group. The job taught one thing more than anything else: raw material quality decides the finished product. Cheap resin looks fine in the can and fails on the fence. You can't formulate your way out of bad inputs.
A few years before that, the same Jamie worked Michigan winters as a lumberjack clearing wetlands around an Air Force base. That's where he learned wood density firsthand, by feel and weight, long before any of it went near a fire.
And before that, he apprenticed under Jesse Campbell at Mr. Rib, a rib shack in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Jesse came up out of Mississippi. He smoked over hickory logs in a trailered pit, hung the meat on hooks, and held a tight window between 235 and 275 degrees. He cooked to exact internal temperatures, never to a clock. His ribs were voted first in the area, year after year, and he had three secrets he'd share: a Hot and Spicy blend Jamie's never fully recreated, an overnight lemon-juice soak (one cup of lemon juice to one gallon of water), and exact-temperature cooking. Most of what Jamie knows about smoke he learned from Jesse.
Restaurant kitchens paid the bills in between. Jamie managed a 700-seat restaurant for several years and learned what consistent quality looks like at volume, when there's no room to fudge it.
The other Jamie (she) spent her career as a first-grade teacher before Kona. If that sounds like an unusual jump into BBQ, it isn't. Teaching first grade is the job of making sure every person in the room feels seen, taken care of, and not falling behind. That's the same work customer experience does for a company. She runs ours, and she's the reason the people who work at Kona and the customers who buy from us both end up feeling like they were treated by a person, not a process.
Jeremy runs operations as our General Manager. Before Kona, he spent 17 years at Procter & Gamble as a lead in supply chain. P&G is where you go to learn how to make process precision invisible at scale, the kind of operation where a product that's perfect in the factory still has to be perfect when it lands at a store in any of 50 states. That's the backbone that lets the rest of us be obsessive about wood quality. The pickiest sourcing in the world doesn't matter if the bag never gets to your door, and Jeremy makes sure it does.
The thread across all of it is the same: ingredients and process decide everything. Polymer chemistry, supply chain, classroom teaching, lumberjacking, smoking. Different worlds, same principle. Get the inputs and the process right and the output takes care of itself. Get them wrong, and no amount of effort downstream fixes it.
How we do it at Kona
We use real, mature hardwood. The species on the label, in the bag, without fillers, binders, or sprayed-on flavor oils. We pay more for the wood, and we accept smaller margins on each bag, because the mission is flavor.
A specific example: a competitor once said publicly that nobody really makes 100% apple, because U.S. apple orchards run small (15 to 20 feet tall, six-inch trunks), the BTU is low, and the wood needs to be blended just to burn. Our answer was: we don't use that wood. We source mature apple from older forgotten orchards. Logs travel to get to us. It's expensive. We do it because the mission is flavor, not because the spreadsheet says to.
That's the standard every Kona product is built to, across every format we sell. Bagged pellets, single-flavor and blends. Meat-specific blends for brisket, ribs, pulled pork, and wings. Smoke Pods sized for the Ninja Woodfire smoke box. The packaging changes. The wood is constant.
When a major appliance brand needed a pellet
When GE Appliances built the GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker, they needed a pellet to put in the box. They chose ours. Every GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker ships with a bag of Kona pellets. A major U.S. appliance manufacturer putting our wood inside their own product says more about the wood than any line we could write here.
Who Kona is for
Ninja Woodfire owners, who only burn about half a cup of pellets per cook and need every scoop to count. Pellet smoker and smoker tube users who've finally figured out which woods they love. Anyone who's tasted a smoke that turned bitter and wondered why. Pitmasters who care what's in the bag. And cooks who'd rather match the wood to the food than buy whatever brand the grill manufacturer sells.
Kona's Smoke Pods are designed for the Ninja Woodfire and similar small-box electric smokers, not for hopper-fed pellet grills. Our bagged pellets work in pellet grills, smokers, smoker tubes, and over charcoal. None of our products are official, authorized, or endorsed by Ninja or any other grill brand. They're compatible. Compatibility is the relationship we actually have, and the one that matters to your cook.
Join the journey
Over 100,000 friends follow us on Facebook and Instagram for recipes, giveaways, and grilling inspiration. Come hang out.
The mission, in one line
Wood should be wood. Less smoke, more flavor. Cook to temperature, not time. Trust your thermometer. Wait for clean smoke.
Mahalo for being part of our flavorful journey.
Jamie and Jamie Harris
Founders, Kona BBQ Store
Kona
118 Sleepy Hollow Dr #4
Middletown, DE 19709
