A Proposal for Regalis Grill

Regalis Foods is a New York based importer and distributor of rare and specialty foods, founded in 2012, supplying fine dining restaurants, retailers and home consumers across the United States. The company operates from facilities in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Detroit and Nashville, employs around 80 people, and produces approximately 50 branded products under the Regalis name. A new Brooklyn showroom and tasting counter opens this winter and will host chefs, dinners and tasting events for around 200 patrons. The Regalis Grill sits alongside that space as the lead product in a new range of kitchen adjacent tools.

The Regalis Grill is a modular, multi-function outdoor cooking system. A wood burning firebox at the base generates heat and smoke, which is carried upward through a stacked series of cooking chambers: a smoker and bread oven section fed by a stainless steel steam generator, and a pizza oven at the top with its own gas assisted burner drawing flow-through heat from below. The modular architecture is intended to let the product be bought and owned in tiers. Firebox and smoker form the base unit, the pizza oven is the first addition, and steam generation the second.

The project is at concept stage. A labelled concept rendering has been provided. No CAD, engineering drawings or physical prototype have been provided to us at this point, and the engineering work therefore starts from the concept. The intake form referenced a CAD file, so if a STEP model does exist at the Regalis end we would welcome it, because it would shorten the early Phase 1 work.

Following the discovery call held with Nick Cunningham on 29 July 2026, C2W Group and Shield Works have been asked to set out a staged development program covering deliverables, costs and timelines from concept through to qualified mass production. This proposal covers Phase 1 of that program, titled Engineering Validation, and previews the stages that follow it.

The following reflects working assumptions drawn from the intake form and the discovery call. These figures are reconciled and validated through Phase 1.

The figures below are preliminary planning ranges, based on C2W and Shield Works actuals for comparable fabricated thermal products together with the anticipated design, engineering, prototype, fixture and tooling content of the Regalis concept. They are not supplier quotations and they will change as the product architecture is defined. They are shared ahead of the Phase 1 work so the shape and scale of the investment is clear from the outset rather than arriving later, and they are firmed up, itemised and locked against specific supplier and tooling quotes in the Development Roadmap.

Stage durations above are working durations and some stages overlap, but the elapsed calendar time to a validated pilot is longer than the sum of the individual stages. Gate approvals and client decisions, tooling and sample lead times, freight between China and the United States, and the Chinese New Year shutdown all sit between stages rather than inside them. The Chinese New Year shutdown beginning in late January 2028 could fall directly across the production and shipping window required to support an early summer 2028 launch, which makes it important to begin Phase 1 within the next few weeks. Ranges assume one product family at launch with the modular tiers derived from a single core architecture, and exclude sample and prototype freight, certification and third-party testing fees, and first production stock. First production stock is sized separately against launch volumes and is never folded into a development budget.

Certification is the widest number on this project and it is not costed in the table above, because accredited testing bodies quote per project against a defined product and their fees are not published. What we can give you now is an order of magnitude, and then replace it with real figures inside Phase 1.

Order of magnitude planning band: USD 60,000 to 150,000 or above, across the gas, solid fuel, electrical and steam functions.

That is not a quote and we are not presenting it as one. A single function gas outdoor cooking appliance is a well-trodden route and sits far below that band. A product crossing four regimes carries engineering judgement work that the testing bodies price for, which is what pushes it up and what makes the range wide. Taken together with the development subtotal above, the planning envelope for the full program through to a validated and certified product sits in the region of USD 200,000 to USD 385,000, before first production stock. We would rather you planned against that figure now than discovered it in ten weeks.

Deliverable 6 exists to replace the band. We engage 2 accredited testing bodies during Phase 1 and obtain written scoping quotations against the architecture we settle, so the numbers come from the organisations responsible for defining and delivering the route, well before any tooling commitment.

What is already established is the likely shape of the route. The gas assisted cooking function is expected to be assessed against either CSA/ANSI Z21.58 and CSA 1.6 for outdoor cooking gas appliances, or CSA/ANSI Z21.89 and CSA 1.18 for outdoor cooking specialty gas appliances, depending on the final architecture and how the testing body classifies the product. The second of those is worth noting, because its scope expressly contemplates smokers, fryer and boiler appliances, and combinations of cooking functions in one appliance, which is close to what the Regalis Grill is. Both standards carry requirements relevant to electrical equipment, wiring and controls. That may allow the electrical functions to be evaluated within the primary appliance certification rather than under a separate product listing, subject to the final control architecture, the certification status of the components selected, and the testing body's determination.

The wood-fired functions are expected to be assessed against UL 2162, current second edition dated March 2025, which covers commercial and outdoor wood-fired ovens of refractory type. Two things follow from that, and both are open questions rather than problems. First, UL 2162 is structured around refractory oven construction and the Regalis Grill as conceived is primarily fabricated steel, so applicability has to be confirmed rather than assumed. Second, where testing bodies apply UL 2162 to wood smokers and solid fuel grills, the mechanism is sometimes a field evaluation with a label applied at the installed location rather than a full product listing. A field label does not work for a product shipped direct to consumers at volume, so establishing whether the wood-fired module can be listed in its own right is a question we put to the testing bodies explicitly. It is the most consequential single question in the certification workstream.

One point sits clearly in the product's favour. The United States residential wood heater emissions rules under 40 CFR Part 60 Subpart AAA do not apply to this product, because cooking appliances are excluded from that regime. The regulated definition requires an appliance intended for space or water heating, which this is not.

Whether the complete system can be evaluated under one primary appliance standard with supplementary requirements, or whether separate module and subsystem evaluations are required, is what Phase 1 establishes directly with the testing bodies rather than guesses at now.

There is also a real commercial lever here. The modular architecture may allow certification to be staged, with the wood-fired base and smoker listed and brought to market ahead of the gas-assisted pizza tier, which would then follow as a separately certified addition. If that route holds up under the standards it takes cost and elapsed time out of the first year and lets the product launch earlier on a narrower listing. Establishing whether it does is part of Deliverable 6.

The intake form recorded a target of USD 500 per unit, which was confirmed on the discovery call as a placeholder rather than a considered figure. We want to be straight about it, because it shapes the whole commercial plan.

The Regalis Grill is a large fabricated stainless assembly with a wood firebox, a gas burner and its control train, multiple insulated cooking chambers, a steam generation system, electronic controls and a cosmetic finish standard appropriate to the Regalis name. Established premium multi-fuel outdoor cooking systems span a retail range from roughly USD 2,300 to over USD 25,000 depending on configuration, and the simpler single function products at the lower end of that range are considerably less complex than what is drawn in the Regalis concept. At a first run of 50 units, with setup and fixturing recovery spread across a small quantity, a USD 500 factory cost is not achievable at the quality level this product needs. Unit cost falls as volume rises, and the quantity breaks in the Phase 1 quotation are structured to show exactly how far and how fast.

Landed cost matters as much as factory cost here. The Phase 1 quotation will present pricing on two bases. First, ex-works or FOB. Second, an estimated landed cost to United States port or a nominated warehouse, showing freight, duty, tariff treatment applicable to the product classification, brokerage and insurance as separately identified lines with the assumptions stated. Residential last mile delivery is modelled separately, because on a unit of this weight it depends materially on packed dimensions, service level and whether the product ships assembled or in modules. Import duty and tariff treatment for steel based products entering the United States is set by product classification and is subject to change, so Phase 1 establishes the correct classification and models against the rates in force rather than quoting a blanket percentage now. One specific recommendation follows from that. Cooking appliances of this kind sit within a tariff heading that currently attracts steel derivative treatment, and the duty outcome for a combined wood and gas unit turns on how it is classified. The swing between plausible classifications is wide enough to matter materially to the retail plan. We recommend obtaining a binding classification ruling from United States Customs and Border Protection, which is inexpensive and removes the uncertainty before any pricing commitment is made. Phase 1 prepares the basis for that application.

We are not setting a unit cost in this proposal. Material, process and supplier decisions move it materially and it should not be fixed before the engineering is done. Establishing it with confidence, at each quantity break, before any production commitment is made, is precisely what the Phase 1 Supplier Engineering Shortlist and Indicative Quotation exists to do.

These risks carry forward into the Development Roadmap with quantified mitigations. Setting them out now shows where our engineering attention will sit during Phase 1.