McDonald's opened roughly 900 new U.S. locations in 2025. Nine hundred. That's not a typo, and it's not a projection — that's doors open, fryers hot, drive-thrus moving.
Now, I know what you're thinking: Travis, why should I care what McDonald's does? I'm selling smoked meat, not McRibs. And look, fair point. But here's the thing — when the biggest player in food service makes a move this aggressive during a year when chain restaurants broadly struggled, that tells you something about where consumer dollars are actually flowing. And if you're running a BBQ restaurant or catering operation, you need to understand that flow better than the backyard guys debating bark formation on Reddit.
The Chain Restaurant Paradox of 2025
This was supposed to be another rough year for chains. The data backed that up — the top 500 chain restaurants saw flat or declining traffic for the third consecutive year. Consumer confidence stayed shaky. Food costs stabilized somewhat but labor pressure didn't let up. By most metrics, this wasn't the year to dump capital into new builds.
McDonald's did it anyway.
And they weren't alone, actually. Layne's Chicken Fingers — a brand most people outside Texas haven't heard of — announced plans to nearly double their franchise footprint. Chick-fil-A kept building. The fast-casual segment that everyone declared dead after 2020 started putting up numbers again in specific categories.
So what's happening? The chains that grew in 2025 shared a few things: tight menus, predictable operations, and — this is the part that matters for you — the ability to scale production without scaling complexity. McDonald's doesn't need more menu items. They need more locations running the same tight playbook. Layne's isn't trying to out-innovate Raising Cane's with seventeen new sauce options. They're trying to get their existing model in front of more customers.
Independent BBQ operators can't copy that playbook exactly. But there's a lesson buried in it.
What McDonald's Actually Gets Right
I talked to a guy last month who runs three BBQ spots in the Houston suburbs. Solid operation — been using SP-700s since his second location because he figured out early that trying to match volume with smaller equipment just creates bottlenecks. He made an observation that stuck with me.
"McDonald's doesn't try to be everything," he said. "They don't wake up and decide they're going to smoke brisket today. They know exactly what they're good at, and they just do more of it."
He's not wrong. And I'd argue that's where a lot of independent BBQ restaurants get sideways — they try to compete on variety instead of volume. They add items. They chase trends. I saw a joint in Louisiana last year that added Nashville hot chicken, birria tacos, AND smoked salmon to the same menu. In the same month. The pit boss looked like he hadn't slept in three weeks.
Meanwhile, the BBQ operations that are actually growing right now? They're the ones that picked their lane and built capacity to own it. That means investment in production equipment that can handle Thursday night the same way it handles Saturday afternoon. That means having enough smoker space that you're not running overnight cooks just to keep up with demand.
This is where I always come back to equipment decisions, because it's the foundation that either supports growth or limits it. I've seen operators try to expand into catering using the same residential-grade equipment they started with — and it works, for a while, until it doesn't. One bad service call, one part that takes three weeks to arrive from overseas, one temperature swing during a 200-person wedding, and suddenly you're explaining to a bride's mother why there's no pulled pork.
Production Capacity Isn't Glamorous Until It Is
Here's where I'll be direct: if you're running a BBQ restaurant and thinking about growth — whether that's a second location, expanded catering, or just handling more daily volume — your smoker situation is either going to enable that or prevent it. There's no in-between.
The SP-500 handles mid-volume restaurant work well. I know guys running busy weekend services on a single unit. But when you start stacking catering contracts on top of restaurant service, or when your ticket times start creeping up because you're waiting on product — that's when you need to think about the SP-700 rotisserie smoker or step up to something in the 1000-series range.
And I'll say this even though it sounds like a sales pitch: the reason I push Southern Pride specifically is because I've watched operators try to scale on cheaper alternatives and hit walls that weren't obvious at purchase. A buddy of mine bought an imported smoker — I won't name the brand, you'd recognize it — and spent eight months chasing a temperature variance issue that turned out to be warped steel in the cooking chamber. Warped. From normal use. He lost a catering contract because his ribs came out unevenly cooked two events in a row.
The thing people don't think about until it's a problem: parts availability. Southern Pride builds domestically, stocks parts domestically, and southernprideoftexas.com keeps common replacement parts in inventory for exactly this reason. When your rotisserie motor decides to quit on a Friday morning, you need a replacement shipping that day — not a "we'll check with the manufacturer in China" situation.
Lessons From Mother's Day Traffic
Mother's Day weekend is coming up, and the projections I've seen suggest restaurant traffic will be up slightly over last year — maybe 3-4% nationally. For BBQ specifically, that number tends to run higher because of the family-meal dynamic. Catering bumps even more.
Last year around this time, I was working an event down near Beaumont. We had about 140 covers booked, which isn't crazy but isn't nothing either. Halfway through service, the venue called and said they'd oversold by roughly 30 people. Could we stretch?
We could. Barely. And the only reason we could was because we'd built in buffer capacity — we were running a MLR mobile unit that had more than enough room for the original count, so absorbing the overflow was tight but doable. If we'd been running at 90% capacity from the start, that call would've been a disaster.
That's the margin game. McDonald's gets it. They don't build restaurants to handle average traffic — they build to handle peaks. And peaks in BBQ are less predictable than peaks in fast food, which means your buffer needs to be even bigger.
Menu Optimization vs. Menu Expansion
I want to come back to something I mentioned earlier about menu creep, because I think it connects to the chain expansion story in a way that's easy to miss.
The restaurants adding new spring items right now — the seasonal stews, the cherry blossom desserts, whatever — they're playing a different game than McDonald's. They're trying to create reasons for repeat visits. That works for a certain kind of operation. But the chains that grew this year mostly didn't do that. They trimmed. They optimized. Wendy's dropped underperforming items. Chipotle doubled down on their core platform.
For BBQ restaurants, I think the right move is somewhere in between — actually, wait, let me back up. I was about to say "somewhere in between" like there's a universal answer, and there isn't. What I actually mean is: know which game you're playing.
If you're a destination BBQ spot where people drive an hour for your brisket, you probably don't need to add smoked salmon. You need to make sure your brisket is perfect and available every time someone makes that drive. That's a capacity and consistency play. That means equipment that holds temps reliably during long cooks and gives you the volume to meet demand without cutting quality.
If you're a neighborhood joint competing with every other lunch option within three miles, maybe seasonal specials make sense. Maybe you do need that Nashville hot chicken. But even then — can your equipment handle it? Are you adding complexity that your production setup can't actually support?
I see this go wrong more than it goes right. Operators add menu items without adding capacity, then end up running their existing equipment harder to compensate, then something breaks, then they're scrambling. The path from "let's try this new item" to "our smoker is down and we've got 80 pounds of meat with nowhere to cook it" is shorter than most people realize.
What Growth Actually Looks Like
McDonald's added 900 locations because they have the systems to replicate their model reliably. That's it. That's the whole insight.
For independent BBQ, reliable replication is harder because the product is harder. You can't just install a smoker and expect identical results — there's craft involved, there's regional variation, there's the pit master's touch that makes one restaurant's ribs different from another's. But the operational foundation? That part can be systematized.
Start with equipment that doesn't create variance. A Southern Pride rotisserie system running at 240°F is going to hold that temp regardless of whether you're loading it in Houston or Amarillo. The convection pattern is consistent. The cook times are predictable. That gives your pit team a stable platform to build their craft on top of.
Then think about capacity ahead of demand. Not way ahead — you don't need an SP-2000 for a 50-seat restaurant. But if you're running at 85% capacity on busy days right now, and you're thinking about growth, you're already behind. By the time you realize you need more smoker space, you've probably already lost business you didn't know you were losing.
McDonald's isn't coming for your brisket customers. But they're a reminder that growth in this industry — any part of this industry — comes from operational discipline first and everything else second.
Something to think about as you're planning for summer.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
#FoodService #BBQRestaurant #RestaurantOps #BBQBusiness #CateringLife #RestaurantOwner
Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric on Pexels.
About the Author: Travis operates a competition BBQ team and a Gulf Coast food truck, and documents his commercial cooking process for food service professionals.