Some people are at a loss when they retire, but Swiss engineer and sausage lover Gabriel Strebel didn’t waste any time.

After a career spent selling industrial machines all over the world, he invested 300,000 francs and three years in developing a unique vertical grill capable of cooking hundreds of sausages an hour.

“I am too lazy to keep turning the meat over and looking if it is going black. That’s how I came up with the idea for the barbecue wheel,” Strebel told Switzerland’s Blick newspaper.

One person using the standard version of the smoke-free ‘Grillrad’ can cook up to 200 sausages an hour. These sausages turn slowly on a wheel, being cooked at 1,400C behind glass so that no heat is lost. The cooking time for each sausage is just over five minutes.

Strebel says the stainless-steel barbecue is idiot-proof: the sausages never come out black or cold, great for events where people may not have the requisite sausage savoir-faire.

It’s not just about sausages either. The barbecue can cook everything from chicken wings to bananas.

The time and effort has paid off. Some 120 of the barbecues have been sold to butchers and clubs in Switzerland and Germany, according to Swiss daily Le Matin.

Strebel hasn’t hung up his tongs yet either. He is currently putting the finishing touches to the fourth generation of his barbecue while devising a new machine for cooking meat skewers.

Meanwhile, Strebel’s cooking record to date saw him serving up 34 tonnes of sausages at the opening of the 57-kilometre long Gotthard base tunnel in 2016.