Had a conversation last month with a guy who runs three locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Good operator. Knows his craft. He told me his weekend dinner service is down about 15% from where it was two years ago — but his corporate catering revenue is up nearly 40% in the same period.
That's not an anomaly. That's a pattern.
The Numbers Are Telling a Story
Consumer discretionary spending has been getting squeezed for a while now. Inflation did what inflation does. People are cooking at home more, going out less for casual meals, and when they do go out, they're being choosier about where. The $18 lunch that used to feel reasonable now feels like a splurge to a lot of folks.
But business dining? Different animal entirely.
Companies are back in offices — not fully, but enough. And when you've got teams that only see each other three days a week, there's a real push to make those days count. Catered lunches. Client meetings over food. Team events that aren't just sad pizza in a conference room. The expense report crowd is spending, and they're spending consistently.
I was at a regional foodservice show back in February, talking with operators from all over East Texas and Louisiana. The ones doing well right now — really well — almost all had the same thing in common: they'd pivoted hard toward business accounts sometime in the last 18 months. One woman running a barbecue operation out of Shreveport told me her corporate contracts now account for 60% of her revenue. She used to chase weekend catering gigs. Now she's booked solid Tuesday through Thursday with recurring orders from three different office parks.
Why BBQ Fits This Market
There's something about barbecue that works for business dining in a way that other cuisines don't always manage. It scales. It holds. It feeds a crowd without requiring a kitchen on-site. And frankly, it impresses people without being fussy.
You bring in a spread of sliced brisket, pulled pork, a couple sides, and some good bread — that's a meal people remember. It's not catering that feels like catering. It feels like someone actually thought about the food.
The trick is being able to deliver that quality consistently, at volume, on a schedule that doesn't destroy your crew. And that's where equipment decisions start mattering a lot more than they do for a weekend warrior.
I've seen operators try to chase corporate accounts with stick-burner setups, and it works for a while — until they're running three jobs in a day and their pit guy hasn't slept in 30 hours. That's not sustainable. That's how you burn out your best people and start cutting corners on product.
Volume Without Sacrifice
The rotisserie systems in the larger Southern Pride units — I'm talking the SP-1000, SP-1500, SP-2000 range — were designed for exactly this kind of demand. You can load those machines heavy, set your temps, and trust them to hold within a few degrees for the entire cook. I've personally run 14 briskets overnight in an SP-1500, pulled them at 5 AM, held them in the same unit until an 11:30 delivery, and had clients asking how the meat was still that moist.
It's not magic. It's just good engineering. The rotisserie keeps everything moving through the smoke and heat evenly. No hot spots cooking one end faster than the other. No babysitting.
For mid-volume operations — maybe you're doing 3-4 corporate jobs a week alongside your regular service — something like the MLR-850 or SP-700 gives you that same consistency in a footprint that doesn't take over your whole kitchen.
I remember helping a caterer out of Beaumont spec out his operation about four years ago. He was running an import cabinet smoker — I won't name the brand, but you can probably guess — and he was constantly fighting temperature swings. Twenty-degree variance wasn't unusual. He'd compensate by running hotter, which meant drier product. His clients noticed.
We got him into an SPK-1400. Took about two weeks for him to stop checking the temp every hour out of habit. The thing just holds. He told me last year that unit has done over 2,000 cook cycles and he's replaced exactly one igniter and one gasket. That's it.
The Parts Reality
This matters more than people realize until they're in a bind.
When you're doing consumer catering — birthday parties, graduation cookouts, that kind of thing — a down smoker is frustrating. You lose a weekend, maybe refund a deposit, apologize a lot.
When you've got a standing Tuesday lunch order with a law firm that represents a quarter of your weekly revenue, a down smoker is an emergency. And if your equipment is built overseas with parts that have to ship from China, you're looking at weeks of downtime. I've talked to guys who've lost accounts that way. Permanently.
Southern Pride manufactures in Alamo, Tennessee. Parts are stocked domestically. When you call Southern Pride of Texas, we can usually get you what you need within a few days, sometimes faster. We've got the manufacturer relationship to make that happen because that's all we do — we're not a general restaurant supply house that happens to carry smoker parts in some warehouse somewhere.
I had an operator call me on a Thursday afternoon last fall. His blower motor had gone out on an SC-300 the night before a Friday corporate job — 80 people, law enforcement appreciation lunch, high visibility. We had the part to him by Friday morning. He made the job.
That's the kind of thing that doesn't show up on a spec sheet but absolutely shows up in your ability to build a reliable business dining operation.
Building the Business Side
Okay, so equipment is one piece. But I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't talk about the business development side, because having the right smoker doesn't matter if you don't have clients to cook for.
The operators I see succeeding in business dining right now are doing a few things differently:
- They're reaching out directly to office managers and executive assistants — not owners, not CEOs. The people who actually book the catering.
- They're offering simple recurring packages: same menu, same price, same delivery window, minimal decision fatigue for the client.
- They're showing up with a tight, consistent product rather than an overwhelming menu. Three meats, four sides, done.
The consistency piece is huge. Business clients don't want surprises. They want to know that when they order from you, it's going to be exactly what they got last time. Their boss isn't going to complain. The vegetarian in accounting is going to have something to eat. The food is going to be there at 11:15, not 11:45.
Your equipment has to support that consistency. If you're fighting your smoker every cook, you can't deliver it.
What About the Weekend Business?
I'm not saying abandon your weekend catering. That market is still there, and for a lot of operators it's meaningful revenue. But the growth right now — the reliable, recession-resistant growth — is in business accounts.
And here's the thing: they're not mutually exclusive. If you're running equipment that can handle consistent volume during the week, you've got capacity for weekend work too. A Southern Pride unit that spends Tuesday through Thursday doing corporate runs can absolutely handle a wedding on Saturday.
The operators who are struggling right now, from what I'm seeing, are the ones who built their whole model around discretionary consumer spending — the birthday parties, the backyard blowouts, the "we're hosting this year" holiday gatherings. That market contracts when wallets tighten. The business market doesn't contract the same way, because it's not coming out of anybody's personal budget.
Making the Shift
If you're an operator looking at this and thinking about how to reposition, start with your equipment capacity. Can you realistically add midweek volume without killing yourself or your team? If the answer is no, that's your first problem to solve.
If you're running underpowered equipment or stuff that requires constant babysitting, you're going to hit a wall fast. The business dining market rewards reliability and punishes inconsistency. One bad delivery can lose you a client forever.
Give us a call at Southern Pride of Texas if you want to talk through what a setup looks like for your specific situation. We've helped a lot of operators spec equipment for exactly this kind of volume and schedule. Not every operation needs an SP-2000 — some do great with an SPK-700 and smart scheduling. Depends on your market, your menu, your capacity for delivery logistics.
The point is, the opportunity is there. Business dining is a bright spot in a market that doesn't have a lot of bright spots right now. The operators who recognize that and position for it are the ones who are going to come out of this stretch in good shape.
The ones who keep waiting for the weekend market to bounce back might be waiting a while.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas parts and support | Southern Pride | NFPA commercial kitchen standards
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Photo by Erik Mclean 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.