A few years after leaving behind the tech game and St. John’s, Jason Janes has a new company with a distinctly low-tech product – wooden barbeque scrapers.

But here's the surprising thing: the young venture called Juniper BBQ Scrapers is showing growth metrics that tech entrepreneurs aspire to. Less than two years old, the company is on the cusp of selling its 100,000th scraper, now offering them through 400 stores across Canada. 

Now based in Newfoundland’s West Coast, Janes said his Deer Lake-based company is profitable and growing. He will be showing the products at the Saltscapes East Coast Expo in Halifax this weekend, and no doubt recounting the unlikely story of an IT developer making his way in the barbeque utensil market.

“One thing I learned about product-market fit is it can come out of left field, just by following your passion,” said Janes in an interview this week. “I mean, I didn’t expect to sell any when we started.”

Janes, who turns 47 this week, has spent his career in IT, most of it in product management. He was one of the co-founders of Startup NL, a volunteer group that brought together techies and entrepreneurs mainly in greater St. John’s. And he was also a co-founder of Sentinel Alert, a startup that helped companies monitor the safety of remote workers.

Sentinel Alert shut down just over two years ago, and Janes left St. John’s for Newfoundland’s West Coast. There he spent time doing something he loves almost as much as technology – barbequing. He didn’t want to use a wire brush to clean his grill for safety reasons, but he couldn’t find an alternative. “I was struggling to find something to clean my barbeque with that was natural and local,” he said.

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Ever the entrepreneur, he researched the matter and discovered that a type of wood known in Newfoundland and Labrador as juniper (larch or tamarack elsewhere) is burn- and rot-resistant and known to resist bacteria.

Janes made his own scraper, and asked friends what they thought. They not only liked it – they wanted one. So he started to sell them.

“Within the first couple of weeks, we sold a few 100 units,” he said. “In parallel with that, we connected with local retailers who wanted to resell it. . . . We went from six stores in our first six months to where we are now with 400 across Canada, and now we’re now starting to add stores in the U.S.”

Janes has tended to focus on specialty stores for barbequing and cottaging. The largest chain that carries the product is Sobey’s, which is selling the scrapers in every province. Juniper BBQ has customers in 70 countries around the world. The team – three full-time and two part-time staff – is remaining focused on the barbeque scrapers though it has produced a second product, bottle openers made from scrap juniper wood.

Janes said the lessons he learned working with tech startups served him well in building the new company. In a way, he considers it a tech company because so much of the marketing was carried out on social media.

‘I learned a lot of things from the startup world and one of them is that we all move much too slow,” he said. “As soon as we got a whiff that there was a need for this product, we went in 100 percent to get it into the market.”