Church's Texas Chicken announced last month they're rolling out a dedicated catering program across most of their U.S. locations. Bulk chicken platters, family-style sides, delivery within a defined radius. The pricing they're floating is aggressive — somewhere around $6.50 per person for their basic package.
I got three calls about this in one week. All from operators who do corporate lunch runs and church event catering. The question was the same each time: should I be worried?
Short answer: maybe. But probably not for the reasons you're thinking.
What Church's Is Actually Selling
Let's be clear about what this program is. Church's isn't building smokehouses. They're not adding pits to the back of their quick-service locations. This is fried chicken in warming trays, biscuits by the dozen, coleslaw in bulk containers. It's the same product they serve over the counter, just packaged for group pickup or delivery.
That's not nothing. Fried chicken travels reasonably well if you know what you're doing. And Church's has 1,500+ locations, which means geographic coverage that no independent operator can match. They'll be able to take orders online, fulfill them same-day in most cases, and price it below what most of us can touch on a per-head basis.
But here's the thing. They're competing for a specific slice of the catering market — the slice where price is the primary driver and nobody's asking questions about the food. Office lunch meetings where someone just needs to feed 25 people for under $200. Youth sports banquets where the budget is whatever parents scraped together. Last-minute events where convenience matters more than quality.
That's real business. I won't pretend it isn't. I had an operator in Lake Charles who made $1,400 a month doing exactly that kind of work — quick corporate lunches, nothing fancy, just reliable delivery and decent food. He's right to be paying attention to this.
The Business They Can't Take From You
But let me tell you about another operator I talked to last year. She runs a catering-heavy operation outside Houston, does maybe 60% of her revenue on events. Church events, company picnics, wedding rehearsal dinners, graduation parties. Her average ticket is somewhere around $2,800.
Church's isn't coming for that business. They can't.
When someone's planning their daughter's graduation party, they're not price-shopping against a fried chicken chain. They're looking for brisket that actually tastes like something, ribs that fall off the bone, sausage links with some snap to them. They want the guy who shows up with a trailer and the smell that makes the neighbors jealous.
That's a different product entirely. And it requires equipment, expertise, and lead time that Church's doesn't have and isn't building.
The catering market isn't one market. It's at least three or four, segmented by budget, occasion, and expectations. Church's is entering the bottom tier — high volume, low margin, convenience-driven. If you're already competing in that space, yes, you have a new competitor with better logistics and national brand recognition. But if you've built your catering business around quality smoked meats and event-level service, this announcement changes almost nothing about your competitive position.
Where I'd Actually Be Concerned
Okay. I said "maybe" at the top, and I meant it. There are scenarios where this matters more.
If you're in a small market — say, a town of 30,000 with one Church's and your BBQ spot — and you've been getting the Lions Club luncheon business mostly because you're the only option that delivers, that could shift. Church's corporate is pushing their franchisees to pursue exactly that kind of recurring local business. Rotary meetings, chamber of commerce lunches, that sort of thing.
Also worth watching: Church's is testing a "premium" tier in some markets. Smoked chicken thighs, larger portion sizes, upgraded sides. They're not doing it well yet (the smoked chicken I tried in a Dallas test location was barely distinguishable from their regular product), but they're clearly aware that catering customers will pay more for perceived quality. If they figure out how to execute that better, the competitive pressure moves up the ladder a bit.
And there's the awareness problem. When a national chain starts advertising catering services, some percentage of customers who never thought to call you for an event suddenly think of catering as "something you order from a chain." That's not direct competition — it's mindshare competition. Harder to measure, harder to fight.
What This Really Comes Down To
Every few years, some QSR chain decides catering is an untapped revenue stream. Chick-fil-A did it. Popeyes tried it. Boston Market built their whole model around it for a while. The results are always mixed, and the reason is always the same: catering requires different operational muscles than counter service.
You need lead time management. You need portion accuracy at scale. You need delivery logistics that don't crater your margins. You need staff who can handle on-site setup and customer interaction that's different from handing someone a bag through a drive-through window.
Church's will figure some of this out. They'll also struggle with parts of it. I'd guess — and this is just a guess based on watching similar rollouts — that they'll see strong initial adoption, then a plateau as operational friction reveals itself, then a quiet scaling back of the program to the markets where it actually works.
Meanwhile, you have advantages they can't replicate. You can customize. You can do on-site cooking. You can offer product variety that a fried chicken chain simply doesn't have. And most importantly, you can build the kind of local reputation and personal relationships that corporate catering programs can never match.
Making the Math Work in Your Favor
Here's where I'll get specific, because vague encouragement doesn't pay anyone's bills.
Catering margins are better than counter service for most BBQ operations — but only if you're set up to capture them. The operators I work with who do catering well typically see food costs around 28-32% on event business (compared to 35-40% on dine-in), with labor efficiency that's significantly better because you're batch-producing instead of cooking to order.
The key is yield consistency. When you're quoting a 50-person event, you need to know exactly how much product you're putting on the smoker and exactly how much cooked meat you're getting back. A 2% swing in yield on a large event can be the difference between a profitable job and one where you barely broke even.
This is why equipment matters — and I'm not just saying that because of what we sell. I had an operator switch from an imported cabinet smoker to an SP-1000 and track his brisket yield for three months. He went from averaging 52% cooked yield to 58%. On his catering volume, that worked out to roughly $280/week in recovered product (that's meat he was losing to inconsistent temps and poor moisture retention).
Southern Pride's rotisserie system is a big part of that. The continuous rotation means more even cooking, less babysitting, and more consistent results across the entire load. When you're running 12 briskets for a Saturday event, you can't afford to have three of them come out overdone because they were sitting in a hot spot.
The domestic manufacturing matters for catering operations too. If something breaks during your busy season and you need a part, you're not waiting six weeks for a shipping container from overseas. Southern Pride of Texas stocks the common replacement parts and can usually get them to you inside a week. I've seen operators with cheaper imported smokers lose entire weekends of catering revenue because they couldn't get a thermostat or igniter in time.
The Actual Strategic Response
So what should you do about Church's entering catering? A few things.
First, know your numbers. What percentage of your catering business is the low-margin, price-sensitive work that Church's is targeting? If it's 10%, don't panic. If it's 60%, you need to either find ways to compete on efficiency or move upmarket.
Second, lean into what they can't do. On-site smoking, custom menus, personal service, actual BBQ instead of fried chicken. Make sure your marketing emphasizes the difference.
Third — and I'll admit this one's a harder conversation — consider whether some of that low-margin catering work was worth keeping anyway. I talked to an operator in Beaumont who dropped most of his corporate lunch business two years ago to focus on larger events with better margins. His revenue went down 15% but his profit went up 20%. Sometimes the business a competitor takes from you is business you should have walked away from yourself.
Church's Texas Chicken has money, logistics, and brand recognition. What they don't have is brisket, pulled pork, or the ability to show up at someone's family reunion with a trailer that smells like heaven. That's your business. Keep it.
If you're looking at equipment that can handle the catering volume without the yield problems, give us a call at Southern Pride of Texas. I'm happy to walk through the models that make sense for your specific operation — whether that's an SPK-700/M for moderate event volume or an SP-1500 if you're doing serious production work. Real numbers, real comparisons, no pressure.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | Southern Pride commercial smokers | Restaurant Business
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Photo by Valeriia Yevchinets on Pexels.
About the Author: Donna spent 18 years as a BBQ restaurant operator before becoming an independent equipment consultant for commercial food service operations.