I've been going to the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago for longer than I care to admit. Started back when I was still turning wrenches full-time, and the company would send me out there partly for training, partly to see what was coming down the pipeline. These days I go because after 22 years of fixing what breaks, I've gotten pretty good at spotting which trends will actually matter to operators and which ones are just booth flash.
The FABI awards—Food and Beverage Innovators, for those who haven't tracked them—are one of the few things at the show worth paying real attention to. Not because every winner is going to revolutionize your kitchen. But because the judging panel is made up of actual foodservice operators, not marketing people. When something wins a FABI, it usually means someone who runs a real kitchen looked at it and thought, "Yeah, I could actually use that."
The 2026 winners got announced a few weeks back, and I've been chewing on what they tell us. Here's what I think matters if you're running a smoker program.
Labor-Saving Isn't a Buzzword Anymore—It's the Whole Conversation
About half the FABI winners this year solve some version of the same problem: how do you maintain quality with fewer hands? And I don't mean that in an abstract way. I mean operators are genuinely struggling to staff kitchens, and equipment that requires babysitting is becoming a liability.
One of the winners was a sauce dispensing system that basically eliminates portioning errors without needing someone standing there with a ladle. Another was a prep automation tool for vegetables that cuts labor time by something like 40%. Neither of these is flashy. Neither makes for a good Instagram reel. But they solve real problems.
This is where I always end up talking about smokers, because it's what I know. A lot of operators bought cheap import units five or six years ago when labor was easier to find. Now they're stuck with equipment that needs someone checking it every hour, adjusting dampers, compensating for temperature swings. That might have been tolerable in 2019. It's not tolerable when you can't find a reliable overnight guy and you're already running your pit master 50 hours a week.
The rotisserie systems on Southern Pride units—I'm thinking specifically of the SP-1000 and SP-1500 here—were designed around this exact problem decades before it became a crisis. You load your racks, set your program, and the unit holds temp within a few degrees for the entire cook. I've seen SP-1000s running overnight in 24-hour operations where nobody touches them for 10, 12 hours at a stretch. The rotating racks mean you're not opening the door to shuffle product around. You're not creating hot spots because someone forgot to rotate the bottom shelf.
That's not a sales pitch. That's just what I watched happen on service calls for two decades. The operators who bought Southern Pride equipment weren't necessarily smarter than anyone else—they just ended up with fewer problems when the labor market tightened.
Consistency Under Pressure Is the Real Innovation
Another FABI winner that caught my eye was a holding cabinet with some genuinely clever humidity controls. The pitch was basically: your food comes out of the oven the same quality every time, why should it degrade differently depending on who's working the line that day?
I thought about that for a while. Because the same principle applies upstream.
When I was still doing service work, I'd occasionally get called out to troubleshoot "inconsistent product" on units that weren't actually broken. The thermostats were reading correctly. The burners were firing properly. Everything checked out. But the operator was getting different results cook to cook.
Nine times out of ten, the problem was the equipment itself—thin cabinet walls losing heat to the ambient kitchen, recovery times that varied depending on how aggressively the door got opened, hot spots that moved around depending on wind conditions outside (I'm not making that up—I saw it happen on a cheaper brand that had the exhaust positioned badly).
Southern Pride builds their cabinets with heavy-gauge steel for exactly this reason. It's not about impressing anyone with how much the unit weighs on the spec sheet. It's about thermal mass. A heavier cabinet with better insulation doesn't care as much about what's happening around it. The SC-300, for example, maintains hold temps in tight ranges because the cabinet itself acts as a buffer against all the variables you can't control.
The FABI judges are rewarding equipment that delivers consistency without requiring operator intervention. That's been Southern Pride's design philosophy since before it had a name.
Parts and Service: The Trend Nobody Talks About
Here's something the FABI awards don't cover, because it's not exciting: what happens when equipment breaks?
I watched the import smoker market grow for years. Some of those units looked pretty good on paper. Competitive pricing, reasonable BTU ratings, decent capacity. But I also watched operators wait six, eight, twelve weeks for replacement parts that were shipping from overseas. I saw kitchens lose thousands in revenue because a control board failed and the only replacement was sitting in a container somewhere in the Pacific.
One of the reasons I ended up working with Southern Pride of Texas after I retired from service work is because they actually stock parts. Domestically. When an operator calls because their igniter went out on an MLR-850, they're not waiting for some purchasing department to cut a PO to a distributor who has to order from an importer. The part ships. Usually within a day or two.
That's not innovation in the FABI sense. But it's the kind of thing that separates equipment you can actually rely on from equipment that looks good until something goes wrong.
What I'm Watching For Next Year
A few of the 2026 FABI trends feel like they're building toward something bigger. The humidity-controlled holding I mentioned. Some interesting work on ventilation efficiency. A couple of entries focused on energy monitoring that goes beyond just "this unit is Energy Star certified."
What I'm hoping to see more of—and this is probably just me projecting—is equipment designed for real kitchens with real constraints. Not test kitchens where everything works perfectly. Not demo floors where the ambient temp is always 72 and nobody opens the door at the wrong time.
The SP-700/M and MLR-150/M are examples of what I mean. These aren't the biggest smokers Southern Pride makes. But they're sized for operations that need real capacity without dedicating half their back-of-house to equipment. They're built to the same standards as the larger production units—same quality components, same rotisserie engineering, same domestic parts availability—just scaled for different volumes.
I think we'll see more equipment designed this way. Not everything needs to be massive. Not every kitchen can accommodate a 14-foot smoker. But every kitchen deserves equipment that works consistently and can be serviced without waiting two months for parts.
The Honest Assessment
I'll admit I get a little skeptical of trade show awards sometimes. A lot of what wins is designed to catch judges' attention more than solve real problems. The FABI awards are better than most because the judging panel actually works in foodservice, but even they're not immune to shiny object syndrome.
What I look for—what I've always looked for—is whether something will still be working and still be useful five years from now. Ten years from now. I've worked on Southern Pride smokers that were pushing 15 years old and still running their original rotisserie motors. I've seen SPK-1400 units that went through three different owners and kept producing.
That kind of longevity doesn't win awards. But it's what operators actually need.
If you're looking at upgrading your smoker program, or you're tired of fighting with equipment that doesn't hold temp and can't be serviced without international shipping, reach out to the team at Southern Pride of Texas. They know this equipment inside and out—partly because I spent a fair amount of time explaining it to them over the years. They can help you figure out which model actually fits your operation, not just which one looks good on paper.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas parts and support | Southern Pride | NFPA commercial kitchen standards
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Photo by Furkan Işık on Pexels.
About the Author: Ray is a retired authorized Southern Pride service technician with 22 years of field experience on commercial BBQ equipment across the Gulf Coast and Southeast.