So what are the dollar amounts of these fellowships and how many are given out and how often? I'm not a huge fan of Kingsford products but I certainly consider this a worthy cause.
A little googling shows Clorox has 6G$/year sales. I'm not sure what portion is Kingsford, but the Wikipedia entry seems to say they sell 1M tons of charcoal per year so I'll estimate that as 1 G$ annually so it's a pretty sizable fraction of Clorox.
Clorox donate 15M$ annually to community and charitable causes which, as a fraction of their 800M$ annual profits, is quite impressive/generous for any industry. (More than the Biblical "tithe"!) Although I'm sure the bulk of this corporate charity is decided at the top level, it's not unreasonable to think Kingsford itself could have a significant say in at least ~1M$ of this annually.
We've see a lot of Kingsford
pro bono work in supporting BBQ tournaments, etc. And now we see it here. Good on them! But I think I'd want to know this is at a ~100k$ level before it would change my charcoal (or BBQ sauce) shopping habits.
On a further positive note (for Kingsford), it appears they're weighting entries from the classic, all-wood fired pit. These guys are suffering. It's hard for a pit to compete with industrial BBQ ovens that generate the heat from natural gas or electricity and only use wood for smoke flavoring, and taking maximum benefit of fan-aided convection inside. That's the way to maximum consistency and profitability. So a true pit boss is definitely a declining art form and their further (future?) support is worthy of complementing.
www.kingsford.com
BTW - Chef Orchid's BBQ wings are to die for!!
