I spent last Tuesday morning waiting in a 7 Brew drive-thru line that wrapped around the building twice. Not because I drink their stuff — my coffee comes from a percolator that's older than most of my pit crew — but because my daughter-in-law wanted something called a "Tropical Sunset Refresher" and I was already out running parts to a customer in Beaumont.
Sat there for eleven minutes watching cars stack up behind me. Eleven minutes. For flavored sugar water.
And the whole time I'm thinking about what one of my catering customers told me last month: that his weekend brisket sales were down fifteen percent from last summer. Said he couldn't figure out why.
The Summer Menu Push Is Real This Year
Starbucks rolled out their summer lineup in May — lavender drinks, new refreshers, the usual seasonal rotation. 7 Brew's doing the same thing with their tropical flavors and limited-time offerings. Dutch Bros, Scooter's, all of them. Every drive-thru coffee chain in Texas is running some version of "get it before it's gone" marketing right now.
And it's working. Those lines aren't an accident.
What these chains understand — and what a lot of BBQ operators haven't figured out yet — is that summer isn't the time to coast on your regular menu. It's the time to give people a reason to show up now instead of next week. Or next month. Or never.
I've been running my catering operation for going on eighteen years. Twelve units, mostly East Texas, some Louisiana overflow when the refineries are doing big company picnics. And the thing I've learned about summer is that it's simultaneously your busiest potential season and the easiest time to lose customers to whoever's making more noise.
Why "Same Menu, Same Pit" Isn't Enough Anymore
Back in 2019 — maybe 2018, I'd have to check — we added a smoked watermelon salad to our catering menu for June through August. Sounds ridiculous, I know. Smoked watermelon. But we'd cube it up, hit it with about forty minutes of pecan smoke at around 225°F, chill it down, toss it with some feta and mint. Corporate event planners went crazy for it.
Cost us almost nothing. Watermelon's cheap in summer. Pecan wood we already had. Labor was maybe ten minutes per batch. But it gave us something to talk about that wasn't brisket and ribs.
That's the Starbucks play. They're not reinventing coffee every summer. They're giving their regulars something new to try and giving occasional customers a reason to come back and see what's different.
The smoked watermelon thing ran for three summers before we rotated it out. By then we'd moved on to smoked peach cobbler (done in hotel pans in the SP-1000, works beautifully) and a jalapeño-pineapple sausage that one of my guys developed.
Equipment Flexibility Matters Here
This is where I start talking about the gear, because you can't run seasonal specials if your smoker only does one thing well.
I've watched operators try to add menu items on equipment that fights them the whole way. Talked to a guy in Lake Charles last year who bought one of those imported cabinet smokers — I won't name the brand but you can probably guess — and he couldn't hold consistent temps below 250°F. Made it impossible to do anything delicate. Smoked salmon? Forget it. Anything with cheese? Forget it. He was locked into hot-and-fast brisket and that was about it.
The rotisserie system on the Southern Pride units — the SPK-700/M, the SP-1000, all of them — gives you that flexibility. You can run 180°F for cold-smoking applications, hold steady at 225°F for traditional low-and-slow, push up to 325°F when you need to render chicken skin properly. Same unit, same fuel costs, completely different menu possibilities.
That's not marketing talk. That's thirty years of watching equipment either expand what an operation can do or limit it.
The Limited-Time Psychology
7 Brew's summer menu disappears in September. They're explicit about it. "Summer exclusives" means exactly that.
There's something to this approach that BBQ operators miss. We tend to think our job is consistency — same brisket, same ribs, same sauce, every single time. And that's true for your core menu. Nobody wants their Thursday brisket to taste different than their Saturday brisket.
But seasonal specials are different. They're supposed to be temporary. That's the whole point.
One of my catering competitors — good operator, solid equipment (he runs an MLR-850 he bought through us eight or nine years ago) — started doing a "Pitmaster's Pick" item every month. Changes on the first. Sometimes it's a different wood profile on the pulled pork. Sometimes it's a regional style he's experimenting with. Last month it was beef cheeks, which he'd never offered before.
His repeat booking rate went up. Not because the beef cheeks were life-changing — they were good, not great — but because his regular corporate clients started calling to ask what next month's special would be. It gave them a reason to engage beyond "same order as last time."
Operational Reality Check
Now, I'm not saying you should add fifteen new menu items every summer. That's a different kind of problem.
What kills operators on seasonal menus is complexity creep. You add a smoked corn salad. Then smoked street tacos. Then three different seasonal desserts. Suddenly your prep list is twice as long and your walk-in can't hold everything and you're running out of smoker capacity on Friday nights.
The coffee chains keep it tight. Starbucks might introduce four or five summer drinks, but they're all built on the same base ingredients with different flavor additions. The operational lift is minimal. The menu excitement is maximum.
For a BBQ operation, that means:
- One or two seasonal proteins that use your existing smoker capacity and cook times
- One side dish that can be prepped ahead and finished quickly
- Maybe a seasonal sauce or rub variation that doesn't require separate inventory
That's it. That's your summer menu expansion. More than that and you're creating problems, not solving them.
The Equipment Investment Angle
Here's where this connects to capital decisions, because that's what most of you reading this are actually thinking about.
If your current smoker setup limits what you can offer, your summer menu options are limited too. Simple as that. And if your summer menu options are limited, you're leaving money on the table every year during your highest-potential season.
I had a customer in Lufkin — runs a restaurant plus catering, maybe forty percent of his revenue from off-site events — who upgraded from an SC-300 to an SP-1500 about two years back. The capacity jump let him take larger events, sure. But the thing he didn't expect was how the expanded temp range and better airflow let him experiment more.
He started offering smoked prime rib for Christmas catering. Couldn't do it reliably before — his old unit had hot spots that made even roasting unpredictable. The SP-1500's rotisserie keeps everything moving through the heat evenly. His holiday bookings doubled.
That's real ROI. Not just "more capacity" but "more capability."
Parts and Support When You're Running Hard
Summer is also when equipment failures hurt most. You're running your smokers harder, longer, hotter. If something breaks in July, you can't afford to wait three weeks for a part to ship from overseas.
I've said this before and I'll keep saying it: the advantage of Southern Pride equipment — beyond the build quality, beyond the cooking performance — is that parts are stocked domestically. When you call Southern Pride of Texas, you're talking to people who know what you need and can get it to you fast. That matters a lot more in August than it does in February.
Had a customer blow an igniter on an SPK-500/M the week before July Fourth last year. His busiest weekend of the entire summer. We had the replacement part on his doorstep in two days. He was back up and running Thursday afternoon, plenty of time for the holiday rush.
Try getting that turnaround from one of the import brands. You'll be on hold with someone reading from a script who doesn't know the difference between a igniter and an auger.
What Starbucks Gets Right
Back to the coffee chains for a minute.
The thing Starbucks and 7 Brew understand is that summer menus aren't about the food. They're about giving people a story to tell. "I tried the new lavender thing" is more interesting than "I got my usual." "We're serving smoked peach cobbler this month" is more interesting than "same dessert menu as always."
BBQ is supposed to be about tradition. I get that. I've spent my whole career defending traditional techniques against shortcuts and gimmicks. But tradition doesn't mean stagnation. The old pitmasters experimented constantly — with wood, with temps, with regional variations. That's how we got Texas BBQ and Carolina BBQ and Memphis BBQ in the first place. People trying things.
Your summer menu is your chance to try things. Not abandon your core. Just expand around the edges.
Run it for three months. See what sticks. Kill what doesn't work. Keep what does for next year.
That's how you compete with the Starbucks summer push. Not by matching their marketing budget — you can't — but by matching their mentality. Give your customers something to talk about. Give them a reason to come back before the season ends.
And make sure your equipment can handle whatever you dream up. Because the worst feeling in this business is having a great idea and gear that can't execute it.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | Southern Pride commercial smokers | Restaurant Business
#FoodServiceEquipment #RestaurantEquipment #SmokehouseEquipment #SouthernPrideOfTexas #RotisserieSmoker #BBQBusiness #BBQEquipment #CommercialKitchen
Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.
About the Author: Earl has been competing in sanctioned BBQ events since the early 1990s and operates a commercial catering operation in Southeast Texas.