Review Guidelines

In my opinion, cooking food on a BBQ grill or smoker is something everyone needs to experience. The overall satisfaction a person receives is directly linked to the equipment they use and the knowledge they possess.

Here at BBQ Smoke Central, we review barbecue equipment and accessories thoroughly to identify the best ones for your needs.

We understand how important it is to get this right.

Grills and smokers can be expensive. With prices on most things climbing to new heights everyday, we want you to feel confident about the performance and quality of any purchase you make. Choosing the best products is very important to you if you take time out of your day to seek guidance.

That is why we hold ourselves to the highest standards when making recommendations. 

Every product we recommend is based on actual reviews, whether we have used it ourselves or we have performed extensive research on the product and are confident it meets our standards.

We thought you would be interested to learn how we select the products you find in our guides.

We do

Here is everything we look for before we feature a BBQ product on our pages.

Research the Product Category 

The first thing we do is look at the product category to see how characteristics of similar products compare in terms of features, quality and price. Based on this review we get a good idea of the top products and what they should offer.

Evaluate Product and Brand Reputation

A product is as good as its reputation or that of its brand. A good reputation is essential to the brand’s success and continued existence. 

Have you heard the famous saying “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”?

This is why before recommending a new product line or brand, we dig through their history and operations extensively to try and assess the risks for you. 

It is vital that the product is safe to use. If the product has unresolved safety or quality issues it makes no sense to buy it. 

We look into product safety-related issues people are complaining about. This includes past and present CPSC recalls and warnings and the manufacturer’s efforts to resolve them.

Extensively Research User Reviews

It would be easy for brands to select high-quality food samples and send them to us for review for maximum grades.

That’s why we put our trust in actual user reviews to make our minds up about a particular brand’s product quality. 

We scour the internet to find what product owners are saying about the product, good and bad.

Based on user feedback and how popular it is we select the best product available.

Sometimes we even reach out to these owners to dig a little deeper and get a better understanding of a product and user experiences.

We collect as much information as possible on the product from multiple sources, i.e., the manufacturer’s website, Amazon, Google, BBQ forums, Youtube, Reddit, etc, which contain a wealth of information on many products.

Analyze Marketing Claims

To sell their products, manufacturers highlight product capabilities, features, build quality, benefits, characteristics, and product performance. We just don’t take them at face value, but instead get the facts for ourselves.

Through user experience and product testing we verify manufacturer claims about the product? If we don’t see eye to eye, we let you know. 

Understand the product’s pricing & positioning strategy

Products come in all shapes, sizes and price ranges. The features and quality of a premium product will be better than those of a budget product. We consider the differences in priceThe price ranges

We take all of this into consideration when writing reviews to provide you with multiple product options on our site.

Ultimately, we aim to help you decide if the product is the right fit for you, because what’s suitable for one person isn’t necessarily right for another.

Take your feedback into consideration

We have added a rating feedback widget to the end of our articles which you can share what you enjoyed and did not enjoy about the piece. This is valuable information from real-life product use. We consider this feedback when updating reviews to include opinions from a various users with different experiences.

We Don’t

Things you will NEVER find on BBQ Smoke Central.

Take sponsorship fees

We do not take money from brands to be featured higher on our pages. We feel it’s our editorial responsibility to feature the best product because helping you is more important.

Post anything without thorough research

All our articles go through a thorough research process, and we don’t make recommendations lightly. So if you read it on our site, you can be sure it’s gone through all the points above, and you can trust the advice.