I get calls about once a week from restaurant owners who want to "get into catering" but haven't done the math. They've seen the big orders — 200 people for a corporate event, wedding rehearsal dinners, company picnics — and they're thinking about revenue without thinking about what catering actually costs their existing operation.
Here's the thing: catering can absolutely transform your profitability. I had an operator in Baton Rouge who went from $380,000 annually to just over $600,000 in two years, and catering was 90% of that growth. But I've also watched restaurants nearly go under trying to serve a Saturday wedding while their regular lunch crowd sits waiting 45 minutes for food.
The difference isn't luck. It's equipment capacity, production planning, and understanding which jobs to take.
The Real Question Isn't "Should I Cater?" — It's "What Am I Actually Selling?"
Most BBQ restaurant owners think of catering as "cooking more of what I already cook, just somewhere else." That's technically true. But operationally, it's a completely different business model running inside your existing one.
In your restaurant, you're selling the dining experience plus the food. Someone orders a two-meat plate, you cook it fresh (or pull it from a hold cabinet), it goes out the window in 8 minutes. Labor is spread across a steady flow of customers. Your smoker runs its normal cycle.
Catering jobs don't work that way. You're selling volume at a fixed delivery time. Everything has to hit temperature simultaneously, transport safely, and arrive looking like it just came off the pit. The labor is concentrated into brutal 4-hour windows. And your smoker? It's now running production loads on top of restaurant loads.
I had a guy in Lake Charles tell me he was "doing fine" with catering until I asked him to actually calculate his per-plate cost on a 150-person job he did last month. When we factored in the extra prep labor, the overnight cook he had to pay someone to babysit, and the brisket he overproduced "just in case," his margin was somewhere around 11%. He'd been pricing at what he thought was 35% margin.
So before you chase catering revenue, you need to know what your actual costs look like — and whether your equipment can handle dual production without sacrificing quality on either side.
Equipment Capacity: The Bottleneck Nobody Wants to Talk About
Your smoker is already running a production schedule for your restaurant. Maybe you're loading briskets at 10 PM, pulling them at noon, holding until service. Ribs go on mid-morning. Pulled pork fits in the gaps. You've got a rhythm.
Now add a 200-person catering job for Saturday at 5 PM. Where does that production go?
This is where I see restaurants make one of two mistakes. Either they try to cram everything into their existing equipment and end up with inconsistent product (rushed briskets, crowded racks, temperature swings), or they turn away catering jobs because "we just don't have the capacity."
Both responses leave money on the table.
The smarter move is understanding exactly what your equipment can produce in a 24-hour cycle, then building your catering capacity around that number. A Southern Pride SP-1000 can run roughly 48 briskets through a full cook cycle. If your restaurant needs 20 of those for weekend service, you've got capacity for another 28 — that's approximately 280 pounds of finished product available for catering before you're asking your equipment to do more than it should.
(At even a modest $14/pound catering rate, that's $3,920 in potential weekend revenue sitting unused if you're not filling that capacity.)
But here's where it gets interesting. If you're running a smaller unit — say an SPK-700 — your math is tighter. You might need to think about adding a second unit specifically for catering production, or being more selective about which jobs you take.
Hold Capacity Matters More Than Cook Capacity
This is the part nobody thinks about until they're standing in their kitchen at 6 AM with 14 briskets that finished early and nowhere to put them.
Catering requires holding product at safe temps for extended periods. Your cook might finish at 4 AM, but delivery isn't until 4 PM. That's 12 hours of hold time. Where's that meat going?
Some operators try to use their smokers as holding cabinets. This can work with Southern Pride units — the rotisserie models hold beautifully at low temps, and that even heat distribution means you're not getting dried-out edges on one side. I've seen SP-700s hold briskets for 8+ hours at around 145°F with minimal moisture loss. But you're also tying up cook capacity while that meat sits there.
If you're serious about catering, dedicated holding capacity is the unsexy investment that makes everything else work. An operator I worked with in Beaumont added two cambro units specifically for catering holds. Cost him about $1,800 total. First month of serious catering, those paid for themselves.
Pricing That Actually Protects Your Margin
Restaurant margins and catering margins shouldn't be the same number. They can't be.
Your restaurant has built-in efficiencies: customers come to you, you've amortized your equipment costs across years of service, your labor is already on the clock. Catering adds transport, setup, potential rental equipment, additional labor hours, and the opportunity cost of whatever else you could've done with that production capacity.
I generally tell operators to target 40-45% food cost on catering, not the 28-32% they might run in their restaurant. Some people hear that and think I'm telling them to charge less. I'm not. I'm telling them to charge more — enough that their real margin after all the catering-specific costs is actually worth the hassle.
Price per head for catering BBQ in most markets runs somewhere between $18 and $35 depending on what's included. If you're at the low end of that range with full service, you're probably losing money. If you're doing drop-off only with disposables and no staffing, you can work at lower price points and still hit margin.
Know which type of catering you're actually doing. And price accordingly.
The Jobs Worth Taking (And the Ones That'll Kill You)
Not all catering jobs are created equal. A 50-person corporate lunch on a Tuesday is completely different from a 200-person wedding on Saturday at 6 PM.
The Tuesday lunch? Your restaurant is probably slow anyway. Your smoker has capacity. Labor is already there. That's gravy.
The Saturday wedding? That's competing directly with your busiest service. You're asking your crew to work harder during the hours they're already stretched. Your equipment is already running at near-capacity. Something's going to give.
- Good catering jobs: Weekday events, drop-off with minimal service, repeat corporate accounts with predictable orders, events where the customer handles setup and service
- Jobs that require careful math: Weekend events during your peak hours, full-service with staffing requirements, one-time events from price-shopping customers, anything requiring equipment you don't own
I'm not saying never take a Saturday wedding. I'm saying understand what it actually costs you — including the stress on your team and any impact on your regular customers — before you quote it.
Building Repeatable Systems
The restaurants that profit from catering aren't the ones who treat every job like a special event. They're the ones who build systems.
That means standardized menus (you're not creating a custom offering for every client), templated quotes that calculate automatically, prep checklists that don't require you personally to remember everything, and production schedules that integrate catering loads with restaurant needs.
Southern Pride equipment helps here because the consistency is repeatable. When I ran my restaurant, I knew exactly how a brisket would come out of my SP-1000 every single time. Temp swings weren't a variable I had to account for. Hold performance was predictable. That consistency meant I could plan catering production with confidence — I wasn't guessing whether this batch would be as good as last week's.
Compare that to some of the import smokers I've seen operators try to use for catering production. Temp variation of 15-20 degrees across the cooking chamber. Thin steel that doesn't hold heat when you open the door. By the time you've adjusted for all those variables, your labor costs have eaten your margin.
Start Small, Scale With Data
If you're not doing any catering now, don't go out and bid a 500-person event next month. Take a few small jobs. Track everything: food cost, labor hours, equipment utilization, actual margin after all costs.
After 10-15 jobs, you'll have real data on what catering costs you. You'll know which jobs were profitable and which weren't. You'll understand your actual capacity constraints. Then you can make informed decisions about whether to invest in additional equipment, hire catering-specific staff, or raise your prices.
I've watched operators build catering into 30-40% of their total revenue this way, adding $150,000+ annually without hiring a single additional full-time employee. But they did it systematically, not by chasing every inquiry that came through the door.
If you're thinking about expanding your catering capacity and need to figure out what equipment configuration makes sense, give us a call at Southern Pride of Texas. We can talk through your production numbers and help you figure out whether your current setup can handle what you're trying to do — or what it would take to get there.
And if you need parts or accessories for equipment you already own, same number. We stock Southern Pride parts domestically and can usually get you what you need faster than going through other channels.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
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Photo by Prosper Buka on Pexels.
About the Author: Donna spent 18 years as a BBQ restaurant operator before becoming an independent equipment consultant for commercial food service operations.