Church's Texas Chicken announced they're bringing on a chief commercial officer — a role that didn't exist at the company before now. If you're running a barbecue restaurant or catering operation, you might wonder why I'm talking about a fried chicken chain. Bear with me. There's something here worth paying attention to.
When a legacy QSR brand creates an entirely new C-suite position focused on commercial strategy, it signals a shift in how they're thinking about growth, menu development, and operational consistency across locations. And that last part — operational consistency — is where things get interesting for anyone running smoke-based protein programs.
Why This Hire Matters Beyond Fried Chicken
Church's has been around since 1952. Started in San Antonio, actually — about three hours west of where I'm sitting in Orange. They've got north of 1,500 locations globally, and like a lot of legacy chains, they've been working to modernize without losing what made people show up in the first place.
The CCO role they've created is specifically about driving revenue through menu innovation, pricing strategy, and what the press release called "commercial excellence." That's corporate-speak, sure. But here's the translation for operators: they're looking to scale new menu items profitably across a massive footprint while keeping food quality consistent from Houston to Honduras.
Sound familiar? It should. That's the exact challenge every multi-unit barbecue operation faces when they try to grow beyond two or three locations.
I spent 22 years servicing Southern Pride units, and probably a third of my calls in the last decade came from chain operations trying to figure out why their new location couldn't match the product coming out of their flagship. Nine times out of ten, the answer wasn't the pit master. It was equipment selection, installation choices, or maintenance practices that varied site to site.
The Chain Restaurant Smoke Problem
Here's something I've watched happen more than once. A barbecue concept gets popular. They open a second location. The founder can't be in two places at once, so they hire people, write procedures, and assume the equipment will do the heavy lifting.
Sometimes it works. Usually when they've standardized on equipment that actually holds temp consistently and doesn't require a pit master to babysit it through a 14-hour cook. But I've seen operations try to save $8,000 per location by going with cheaper imported smokers, then spend twice that over three years on service calls, replacement parts they can't source domestically, and product they had to throw away because the unit couldn't hold 225°F overnight without swinging 40 degrees either direction.
The Southern Pride rotisserie systems — I'm thinking specifically of units like the SPK-1400 or the SP-1000 — were designed for exactly this scenario. Not because they're fancy. Because they're boring in the right ways. Consistent hold temps. Domestic parts availability. Build quality that means the unit you install in location seven performs identically to the one in location one, five years later.
That's what "commercial excellence" actually looks like when you translate it from boardroom to kitchen.
What QSR Growth Patterns Mean for Equipment Planning
When chains like Church's create positions focused on commercial strategy, they're usually planning for aggressive unit growth. That means standardized equipment specs, centralized purchasing, and very little tolerance for site-by-site variation.
For barbecue operations watching this and thinking about their own growth, the lesson is worth internalizing early.
I talked to a operator last spring who was opening his fourth location. He'd used three different smoker brands across his first three stores because each time, someone had a deal for him or a buddy recommended something different. His brisket varied so much location to location that Yelp reviews started mentioning it. Not kindly.
He ended up ripping out two of those units and standardizing on SP-700 models across all four locations. Painful upfront. But his training got simpler, his parts inventory consolidated, and — this is the part that surprised him — his food cost dropped because his cooks stopped compensating for equipment inconsistency by pulling meat early or running temps hot.
Parts and Service: The Hidden Growth Constraint
Something else happens when chains scale quickly: their equipment service needs outpace their ability to manage them. I've seen operations with 12 locations and no centralized parts sourcing. Each store manager calls whoever picks up the phone. They're paying retail for ignitors, waiting two weeks for thermostats, and losing money every day a unit sits cold.
This is actually one of the reasons I ended up working with Southern Pride of Texas after I retired from field service. Having a regional distributor who actually stocks parts, understands the equipment, and can get a replacement auger motor to you in days instead of weeks — that's a competitive advantage most operators don't think about until they're staring at a broken unit on a Friday afternoon before a catering job.
The import brands especially struggle here. I won't name them all, but you know the ones. Attractive price point, decent enough build quality on paper. Then something fails and you find out the control board ships from overseas, there's no domestic service network, and your unit is down for three weeks while you scramble to figure out a workaround.
Southern Pride builds everything in Illinois. Parts are stocked domestically. When a restaurant in Beaumont needs a burner tube for an MLR-850, they're not waiting on international freight.
Menu Innovation Requires Equipment Flexibility
The other angle on this Church's hire that caught my attention: menu innovation as a growth driver. QSR chains are constantly testing new proteins, new formats, new LTOs. A chief commercial officer is partly responsible for figuring out which of those tests can scale profitably.
For smoke programs, that means your equipment needs to handle more than your current menu. I've worked on units that operators bought specifically for brisket, then realized they couldn't run chicken or pork shoulders efficiently because the capacity or rack configuration didn't support it.
The rotisserie systems in the Southern Pride lineup — the SPK-500/M through the large-scale SP-2000 — are built with that flexibility in mind. You're not locked into one protein or one cook style. The MLR-850 handles serious volume, but it'll do pork butts on Monday and turkey breasts on Thursday without requiring different equipment.
That matters when you're trying to respond to what's selling, not just what you planned to sell six months ago.
The Real Takeaway for Independent Operators
Church's Texas Chicken adding a chief commercial officer isn't going to change your Tuesday lunch service. But the thinking behind that hire is worth understanding.
Big chains succeed at scale because they obsess over consistency, standardization, and reducing variables. Equipment is one of the biggest variables in any cooking operation, and smoke programs amplify that because the cooks are longer and the margin for error is thinner.
If you're running one location and thinking about two, or running three and thinking about six, the equipment decisions you make now will either enable that growth or constrain it. I've seen both outcomes, many times over.
The operations that scale smoothly tend to share a few things: they standardize early, they build relationships with distributors who actually understand the equipment, and they choose units built for commercial abuse rather than units priced for hobbyist appeal.
Southern Pride has been my answer to the "what should I buy" question for a long time. Not because I worked on them — I worked on plenty of other brands too, and that's partly why I have the opinion I do. The domestic manufacturing, the parts availability, the build quality that actually holds up over years of daily use. Those aren't marketing points. Those are the things that kept my phone from ringing at 6 AM on a Saturday.
Well. Kept it from ringing quite as often, anyway.
If you're thinking about equipment for expansion, or trying to figure out how to get more consistency across locations you already have, the team at Southern Pride of Texas can walk you through the options. They've heard the same questions I used to hear in the field, and they actually know the answers.
Resources: Southern Pride of Texas | QSR Magazine | Restaurant Business Online
#BBQRestaurant #RestaurantIndustry #FoodServiceIndustry #RestaurantOwner #SouthernPrideOfTexas #CateringBusiness #BBQBusiness
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.