Who made briquettes popular?

A major role in making barbecue popular was played by Henry Ford. Indeed, the same Ford as that of the cars. When it started mass-producing the T-Model, cars were still largely made of wood. So Ford bought large parcels of forest and had a sawmill built in the process. He used the waste (roots, branches, sawdust) to make charcoal briquettes. However, supply exceeded demand. From there, Ford introduced the so-called Picnic Kits in the mid-1930s , consisting of a portable grill with charcoal briquettes sold through Ford dealers. In doing so, he capitalized on the new craze for car camping, which he himself intensively encouraged in order to sell even more cars, while en passant earning a decent grab bag extra by selling otherwise worthless residual waste.

Ford Charcoal was sold to a group of investors in 1951 and renamed Kingsford Charcoal. This plant today produces 80 percent of all charcoal briquettes in the United States.

Along with fellow multimillionaires Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone (and world-renowned nature photographer John Burroughs), Henry Ford formed a club of friends in the 1920s called The Vagabonds who for years in a row held motorized camping trips in the great outdoors (which received a lot of media attention), making both this form of recreation and barbecue, very popular with a wide audience.