I was talking to a buddy who runs a 60-seat BBQ joint outside Beaumont last month. He pulled up his beef invoices from January 2022 and laid them next to his current ones. Packer briskets that were running him $3.10 a pound are now pushing $4.50 — sometimes higher depending on the week. He wasn't complaining, exactly. He was just staring at the numbers like he was trying to make them make sense.
They don't make sense. But here we are.
The conversation shifted pretty quickly from "this is brutal" to "okay, what are you actually doing about it?" And that's the question I keep hearing from operators all over the Gulf Coast region. Not the hand-wringing about inflation — everyone's past that stage. The real question is what's working and what's just rearranging deck chairs.
The Obvious Move That's Harder Than It Looks
Raising prices. Everyone knows they need to do it. Most operators I talk to have done at least one round of increases since late 2022, some have done two or three. But here's the thing — there's a ceiling, and it's lower than your food costs might suggest.
One caterer I know tried pushing his brisket plate to $24 and watched his lunch traffic drop by about 30% inside of two weeks. He pulled it back to $21 and recovered most of those customers, but now he's working with margins that feel like a joke. The math says he needs $26 to hit his old percentage. The market says $21 is already aggressive for his area.
So price increases alone aren't going to save anybody. The operators who are actually navigating this — not just surviving, but building sustainable operations — are doing something more interesting. They're rethinking what goes on the menu in the first place.
The Pork Renaissance Is Real
I've been watching menus shift toward pork in a way that would've seemed backwards five years ago. Texas BBQ has always been beef-first, but when choice brisket flats are costing what prime used to cost, operators start paying attention to what else comes off the smoker.
Pork shoulder is still running somewhere around $1.80-$2.20 per pound depending on your supplier. The yield isn't as clean as brisket — you're looking at maybe 50-55% after cook loss versus the 45-50% you get from a well-trimmed packer — but the raw cost difference more than makes up for it. A pulled pork sandwich at $12 leaves room to breathe. A sliced brisket sandwich at $16 is fighting for every penny.
The smart operators aren't abandoning brisket. They're repositioning it. Brisket becomes the premium item, the thing people order when they're celebrating or treating themselves. Pork shoulder, ribs, smoked sausage — those become the everyday items that actually pay the bills.
I talked to one restaurant owner in Lake Charles who restructured his entire menu around this idea. His "Pitmaster's Choice" combo defaults to pulled pork and a quarter rack of ribs. Brisket is a $6 upcharge. He said about 40% of customers take the upcharge, which is exactly what he wanted — enough demand to justify keeping brisket on the menu, but enough default pork sales to keep his food costs in the low 30s where they belong.
Whole Utilization Isn't New, But It's Getting Serious
Here's something that separates the operators who came up through competition from the ones who learned in restaurant kitchens: the competition guys have always used everything. Burnt ends from the point. Chopped brisket from the flat ends and odd pieces. Beef tallow saved and reused.
That mentality is spreading. I'm seeing more menus with "chopped beef" as a distinct item, priced below sliced brisket but positioned as its own thing rather than a consolation prize. One operator I know built an entire loaded baked potato menu around chopped beef and burnt ends — uses all his trim, sells at a premium because of the perceived value of "burnt ends," and customers don't feel like they're getting downgraded.
The waste that used to go in the discard bin or get donated is now revenue. Fat caps get rendered. Bark trimmings get folded into baked beans. It's not glamorous, but I've seen operators claw back 3-4 percentage points on food cost just by getting religious about utilization.
Equipment Consistency Matters More When Margins Disappear
This might sound self-serving — and maybe it is — but I've watched operators lose thousands of dollars to temperature swings and inconsistent cook times that they never would've tolerated when margins were healthy.
When brisket was $2.50 a pound, you could absorb the occasional over-cooked flat or the batch that went too long because someone misjudged the pit temp. When it's $4.50, that's not just an annoyance. That's your profit margin for the day walking into the trash.
I run a Southern Pride SPK-700 on my truck, and the rotisserie system is probably the single biggest reason I can predict my yields within a pound or two on any given cook. The rotation means I'm not babysitting hot spots. The hold temps stay within a few degrees of where I set them. I load it, I check it, but I'm not fighting it.
Compare that to the stick-burner operations — and look, I love a stick burner, the flavor profile is incredible — but I've seen guys lose entire briskets to temperature spikes when someone got busy with service and missed their window. At current prices, one bad brisket costs more than a month of propane.
The SP-1000 and SP-1500 are what I see in most of the mid-size restaurant operations that are staying profitable right now. The build quality on those units means they're still running strong after eight, ten years of daily use. I know a guy in Baton Rouge running an SP-1000 he bought used in 2014 — thing's outlasted two ownership changes and still holds temp like it's new. Try finding parts for a ten-year-old import smoker. Actually, don't try. You'll just get frustrated.
Menu Simplification (Done Right)
There's a version of menu simplification that's just cutting items because you're scared. That usually backfires — customers notice when their favorite side dish disappears, and they don't always come back.
The version that works is more strategic. You look at every item on your menu and ask two questions: What's my actual cost to produce this, and what would happen if I took it off?
One operator I know ran his numbers and realized his smoked turkey breast — which he thought was a cheap protein option — was actually costing him more per portion than his pork ribs when you factored in the specialized sourcing and lower yield. He pulled it. Nobody complained. He'd been making it because he thought he needed a lighter option, but his actual customers were coming for traditional BBQ anyway.
Sides are where things get interesting. Potato salad, coleslaw, beans — these have always been margin builders. But ingredient costs on those have climbed too. Mayonnaise, cheese for mac and cheese, even basic vegetables. Some operators are moving toward sides that are more labor-intensive but ingredient-cheap: pickled vegetables, simple slaws dressed with vinegar instead of mayo-based dressings, cornbread made from scratch instead of purchased.
It shifts the cost from ingredients to labor. Whether that helps depends entirely on your operation.
The Catering Question
Catering margins have always been better than restaurant service — you can price more confidently, you're not dealing with walk-in unpredictability, and you can plan your cooks precisely. In a high-inflation environment, some operators are leaning harder into catering as their profit center while keeping the restaurant as more of a break-even marketing operation.
That's a real strategic choice, and I've seen it work. But it requires equipment that can handle production volume without babysitting. Running a 200-person corporate event off a trailer smoker you have to feed wood every 45 minutes is a different proposition than loading an MLR-850 and knowing your timing is locked in.
One catering operator I know upgraded from a competitor's cabinet smoker — I won't name names, but it's the one with the parts availability issues — to a Southern Pride SP-2000. His yield consistency went up something like 12% almost immediately, just from eliminating the hot zones that were drying out his flats. At current brisket prices, that paid for the upgrade in under a year.
What's Actually Sustainable
I don't think ingredient costs are coming back down to 2019 levels. Maybe ever. The operators who are building for the long term aren't waiting for relief — they're restructuring around the new reality.
That means menus weighted toward proteins that pencil out. It means equipment that produces consistent results without waste. It means pricing strategies that protect margin without losing customers. And it means — honestly — working harder on the business fundamentals than a lot of BBQ operators ever had to before.
The pitmasters who got into this because they love smoking meat are having to become financial analysts and menu engineers on top of everything else. That's exhausting. But the ones who figure it out are going to be in a much stronger position when things eventually stabilize.
If you're running equipment that's fighting you — inconsistent temps, parts you can't source, holds that drift — you're handicapping yourself before the food costs even hit. The team at Southern Pride of Texas can talk through what makes sense for your volume and operation. That's not a sales pitch — it's just where I'd start if I were trying to shore up the production side of the equation.
The menu changes matter. The pricing strategy matters. But you can't execute any of it if your equipment is working against you.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
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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.