I got a call last spring from an operator in Beaumont who'd opened his second location eight months earlier. Good guy, solid product, packed house at the original spot. The new place was bleeding money. His question: should he switch to a pellet system to cut labor costs?
We talked for about forty minutes. Turned out his problem had nothing to do with pellet versus stick-burner versus gas-assist. His problem was he'd bought the same smoker model for location two that he was running at location one — an SP-500 — even though location two was doing catering drops three days a week on top of regular service. He was running that poor unit ragged, couldn't build enough product buffer, and his cook was working six-hour overnight shifts just to keep up.
The equipment wasn't wrong. The capacity math was.
The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes
When operators expand, they think about the menu first. They obsess over the lease terms. They hire a GM. And then somewhere in month two of build-out, someone says "we need smokers" and the owner just orders whatever they're already running.
I've watched this happen maybe thirty times in my career. Sometimes it works out. More often, it doesn't — and the owner spends the next two years thinking their expansion was a mistake when really they just miscalculated production needs.
Your second location is not your first location. Even if you're serving the same menu to the same demographic in a town twenty miles away, the operational demands are different. Maybe you're adding catering because your brand is now established enough to get corporate accounts. Maybe you're doing lunch service this time. Maybe you have a bigger dining room but the same kitchen footprint.
All of those change the equipment equation.
Capacity Isn't Just About Cook Chamber Size
Here's where I've seen owners get confused. They look at the spec sheet — an SP-700 holds more racks than an SP-500, so they figure if they need more capacity, step up to the bigger box. That's part of it, but it misses the throughput question.
Capacity is cook chamber volume times daily cook cycles. An SP-500 running two full brisket loads per day produces different output than the same unit running one load. And how many loads you can run depends on your overnight staffing, your hold equipment, and how much product buffer you can realistically maintain.
Most single-location BBQ restaurants run one overnight cook. The briskets go on around 9 PM, come off around 8 or 9 AM, go into a holding cabinet, and you serve from that inventory until you run out or close. That works when you know your demand and have dialed in your pars.
A second location complicates this. Now you're either duplicating that entire overnight operation — which means duplicating labor — or you're cooking centrally and transporting. Both are valid approaches, but they require different equipment configurations.
Central Production Changes Everything
Some multi-unit operators cook everything at a commissary and truck product to each location. I've worked with a handful of these setups over the years, and when they work, they work beautifully. Consistent product, lower total labor cost, easier quality control.
But here's what catches people: central production requires holding and transport infrastructure that most operators underestimate. You're not just buying a bigger smoker. You're buying multiple holding cabinets, probably some mobile hot boxes, and you're setting up a production schedule that has zero margin for equipment failure.
This is where I tell people to think hard about redundancy. If your single SP-700 goes down at a commissary feeding two locations, you're dead in the water. Two SP-500s giving you equivalent capacity but with backup? That's a different risk profile. Costs more upfront. Might save your business when a thermocouple fails at 2 AM.
(I'm not trying to sell you two smokers when one would work. I'm trying to save you from the phone call I got from a guy in Lake Charles who lost an entire Saturday's revenue because his single unit had a gas valve issue and no backup.)
The Catering Question
Catering changes capacity requirements more than anything else. Regular restaurant service is somewhat predictable — you know your busy nights, you build your pars, you adjust seasonally. Catering is spiky. You might have nothing on Tuesday and then a 200-person corporate order drops for Thursday.
If you're adding catering at location two (or expanding catering volume because now you have the brand recognition), you need surge capacity. That usually means one of two things:
- A larger primary unit than you'd need for just in-house service — something like an SP-700 or even an SP-1000 if your volume justifies it
- A mobile unit like the MLR series that can handle overflow and pull double duty at on-site catering events
The MLR approach is interesting because it also gives you a marketing asset. People see the smoker at events. That visibility has value beyond the production capacity.
Hold Capacity Is Where People Get Burned
I've said this before and I'll keep saying it: your smoker is only as good as your holding setup. Doesn't matter if you can cook 40 briskets overnight if you can only hold 20 of them at proper serving temp.
When you're planning a second location, map out your hold capacity alongside your cook capacity. How many briskets, pulled pork portions, and ribs do you need accessible during peak service? What's your holding cabinet situation? Are you using the smoker itself as a hold unit during slow periods (which works but limits your flexibility)?
A Southern Pride rotisserie unit with the gas-assist system — the SL-100 or SL-270 — can hold at lower temps pretty efficiently, which gives you some buffer. But dedicated holding cabinets are almost always worth the investment at a second location. I've seen too many operators trying to time everything perfectly because they don't have enough hold space, and perfect timing falls apart the first time you get a rush you didn't expect.
A Word on Parts and Service
This probably sounds self-serving coming from a guy who worked as a service tech, but hear me out: when you have one location, equipment downtime is painful. When you have two locations, equipment downtime can cascade in ways you don't anticipate.
I've watched operators with two units from different manufacturers — maybe a Southern Pride at location one and an Ole Hickory they got a deal on for location two — scramble when both need service in the same month. Different parts pipelines, different service networks, different everything.
There's real value in standardizing your equipment across locations. Same models means your cooks can move between locations without relearning. Same parts means you can stock common wear items — thermocouples, ignitors, gaskets — and have them available for either unit. Same service relationship means one phone call when something goes sideways.
Southern Pride parts are stocked domestically. I'm not going to pretend we never have back-ordered items — anyone who tells you that is lying — but the manufacturing being in Illinois means replacements typically ship same-day or next-day. I've seen operators with imported equipment waiting three weeks for a control board. Three weeks is a long time to run your cook on manual override.
The Math You Actually Need to Do
Before you order equipment for location two, sit down with your actual numbers. Not projections. Actual sales data from location one.
How many pounds of brisket did you sell last Saturday? What's your brisket yield — somewhere around 45-50% of raw weight, typically? Work backward from there. A 14-pound packer yielding maybe 7 pounds of sliced and chopped means you need to cook X number of packers to hit Y pounds of sellable product.
Then add your expected catering volume. Then add a buffer for growth — if you're expanding, presumably you expect demand to increase. Then look at what that production requirement means for cook cycles and chamber capacity.
That's the number that tells you whether you need an SP-500, SP-700, or something bigger. Not a guess. Not "what we're already running." The actual math.
The Beaumont operator I mentioned at the start? We eventually got him into an SP-700 at the second location. He sold the SP-500 to a food truck guy who was thrilled to get a used unit in good condition. Last I heard, both locations are doing fine.
He just needed the right tool for the actual job. Most expansion problems are some version of that.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
#BBQBusiness #CateringBusiness #RestaurantOwner #CommercialBBQ #BBQRestaurant #SouthernPride #CateringLife #FoodServiceIndustry
Photo by Clarence Gaspar 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.