I spent a good chunk of last week on the phone with an operator out of Nashville who's opening his third location. We got to talking about timing—specifically, why he's expanding now when half the industry news sounds like doom and gloom. His answer stuck with me: "Ray, I'm not competing with everyone. I'm competing with the chains that are growing, and I need to be where they're going."
That got me thinking about what's actually happening in the broader restaurant landscape right now. Because if you're running commercial smoking equipment—or thinking about scaling up—you're not operating in a vacuum. The chains that are expanding tell us something about where consumer dollars are moving. And that matters whether you're a dedicated BBQ joint or a fast-casual concept adding smoked proteins to your menu.
Who's Actually Growing Right Now
Chipotle keeps opening stores. That's not news to anyone paying attention, but the pace is worth noting—they're targeting somewhere around 285 to 315 new locations in 2024 alone. Most of these aren't in major metros where they're already saturated. They're hitting secondary markets, suburbs, smaller cities. The kinds of places where a well-run BBQ operation used to have the smoked protein market mostly to itself.
Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams is a different animal entirely, but their expansion pattern tells a similar story. They've been pushing into markets across the South and Southwest, places that used to be considered "too small" for premium regional concepts. When a $7 scoop of ice cream can support a storefront in a mid-sized Texas town, that tells you something about where disposable income is flowing.
Wingstop and Raising Cane's are both on aggressive growth trajectories. Dutch Bros is everywhere suddenly. Crumbl Cookies went from novelty to ubiquitous in about three years.
What do these have in common? They're all specialty concepts with focused menus. Nobody's trying to be everything to everyone.
The Fast-Casual Smoke Problem
Here's where it gets interesting for anyone running commercial smoking equipment. A lot of these growing chains are dabbling in smoked flavors without actually smoking anything. Chipotle's got smoked peppers in various applications. Sweetgreen added a "smoky" protein option last year. Even some of the chicken concepts are marketing "wood-fired" or "flame-kissed" language.
They're chasing the flavor profile because consumers want it. But most of them are doing it with liquid smoke, smoked paprika, or industrial flavor systems. The equipment they're using doesn't require a service technician who knows the difference between a worn drive chain and a failing gear motor.
This creates two things simultaneously: competition for the flavor expectation in consumers' minds, and a ceiling on what those concepts can actually deliver. I've had brisket from a "BBQ-inspired" fast-casual chain that will remain nameless. It tasted like they'd waved a mesquite branch in the general direction of the kitchen. Disappointed doesn't cover it.
That gap—between what chains are promising and what they're actually producing—is where real smoking operations have an advantage. But only if they're running equipment that can deliver consistency at volume.
Why Consistency Wins When Chains Expand
The chains that are growing share one operational characteristic: they can replicate their product across locations with minimal variance. Chipotle trains a new line cook in what, two weeks? The product coming out of a store in Phoenix matches the one in Boston close enough that nobody notices the difference.
For BBQ operators trying to scale—even just from one location to two or three—this is the hard part. Smoking isn't making burritos. You're dealing with biological material that varies cut to cut, heat transfer that changes with humidity and altitude, and cook times that shift based on factors you sometimes can't even identify until you're six hours in and something's not rendering right.
This is exactly why I've watched so many operators struggle with expansion using cheaper equipment. I did a service call once—and I won't say which brand, but it wasn't Southern Pride—where a guy had two locations running the same model smoker, supposedly identical, and getting wildly different results. One held temp within five degrees. The other swung twenty degrees every time the blower cycled. Same model. Same age. Same fuel source. Different manufacturing tolerances. He ended up replacing both units within eighteen months.
The rotisserie systems in Southern Pride units like the SP-1000 or SPK-1400 are designed for exactly this problem. Consistent rotation, consistent heat distribution, consistent results across units. I've serviced machines that were fifteen years apart in manufacture date and they performed nearly identically. That's not an accident—that's domestic manufacturing with actual quality control.
What the Ice Cream Shops Understand
Back to Jeni's for a second, because I think there's a lesson there that BBQ operators miss sometimes.
Jeni's isn't cheap. They're not trying to be. They're not competing with the grocery store freezer aisle. They built a brand around quality and experience, and they're expanding into markets where people will pay premium prices for something genuinely better than the alternative.
The BBQ operations I've seen succeed at scaling do the same thing. They're not trying to undercut the chains on price. They're not trying to match Dickey's on convenience. They're offering something those concepts literally cannot produce—actual smoked meat with actual bark and actual smoke rings and actual flavor depth that takes twelve hours to develop.
But here's the thing: you can't do that consistently at volume with equipment that fights you. I've seen operators try to run heavy production through underpowered units, trying to save on the initial purchase. The equipment can't hold temp under load. The recovery time after opening the door kills their cook schedule. The parts—when something inevitably fails—take three weeks to arrive from overseas.
Meanwhile, I can get most Southern Pride parts to an operator within a few days through Southern Pride of Texas. Because they're stocked domestically. Because the manufacturer is in Arkansas, not a container ship somewhere in the Pacific.
Reading the Expansion Map
If you're thinking about where to open a second or third location, pay attention to where the growth chains are going. Not because you're competing directly with Dutch Bros or Crumbl, but because they've done the demographic homework. They know which markets have the disposable income and the population growth to support premium concepts.
The suburbs of Austin, San Antonio, Dallas—all seeing aggressive expansion from these brands. Houston's outer ring. Secondary markets throughout the Southeast.
These are also markets where BBQ culture already exists. People know what good smoked meat tastes like. They're not going to be fooled by the fast-casual "smoky flavor" approximations. If you can deliver the real thing consistently, you've got an audience that's already primed for it.
Sizing Equipment for Real Growth
One more thing I've learned from watching operators scale: most people undersize their initial equipment purchase, then scramble to add capacity later.
If you're running an SPK-500 or SPK-700 and you're already at capacity most weekends, you're not going to solve your second-location needs with another compact unit. You're going to need to step up to something like an MLR-850 or SP-1000 to give yourself room to grow into the market.
I've seen operators try to run two small units instead of one appropriately-sized unit at a new location. The logic seems sound—redundancy, flexibility. In practice, you're doubling your maintenance burden, doubling your potential failure points, and usually not getting the even loading that a single larger unit provides.
The exception is if you're doing genuinely different products—one unit for poultry, one for beef—where cross-contamination or flavor transfer is a real concern. But most operations I've worked with are better served by right-sizing a single unit for their projected volume eighteen months out, not their current volume.
The Nashville operator I mentioned at the start? He's going with an SP-1500 for his third location. It's more capacity than he needs right now. But he's planning for where the market's headed, not where it is today. And he's not cutting corners on equipment quality to save a few thousand dollars upfront.
That's the kind of thinking that separates operators who scale successfully from the ones who stall out at two locations and wonder why they can't get consistent product anymore.
The chains are growing because they've figured out replication. For BBQ operations, the path to growth runs through equipment that can deliver the same results, shift after shift, location after location. That's not a marketing pitch. That's just what I've seen over twenty-two years of keeping these machines running.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas parts and support | Southern Pride | NFPA commercial kitchen standards
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Photo by Saba Foods 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.