The Grillzilla Story

What is Grillzilla? Grillzilla is a twenty four foot trailer equipped to cook the best smoked meats you have ever tasted!

How did the idea for Grillzilla start? People ask me that question all the time.

It happened after the Big Show Grilling Team won first place in a Memphis in May barbecue competition in Charlotte North Carolina. The team members were Carl Lewis, Fred Overman, Eric Krause and me. As usual the team celebrated hard after that win and stayed over Sunday night to share the win with John Boy and the Big Show radio audience. As he normally did John Boy made our win sound much larger than it really was by spending the entire Monday morning show talking about how The Big Show Team won first place. Looking back I think our ribs were good that day but I also think the association with the John Boy and Billy Big Show influenced the judge’s decision especially on the second team visit. Anyway, we won a first place!

I got to thinking how good John Boy made winning first place in ribs sound on the radio. It was especially good marketing for the John Boy and Billy Grilling sauces. That’s when the idea of cooking in more competitions came in our minds. If we were going to be competitive competition barbecue cookers we had to have the best equipment money could buy. By the way in those years we were making so much money with the Grilling Sauce success we needed something to spend it on that was business related anyway.

Since I was busy with the day to day business operation Carl took on the project of finding us the right equipment. Carl knows how to cook barbecue. He was interested in something custom made to his ideas based on his life long experiences with barbecue. At some point Carl had some experience with Southern Pride barbecue smokers. He contacted Southern Pride and got us a demo smoker we could play with. Unfortunately we could not work out an acceptable business relationship with Southern Pride. We were both disappointed because that type of barbecue smoker was perfect for what we had in mind to do.

We started looking for a replacement. That is how we discovered the Ole Hickory Barbecue Pit Company. Their pit was a very similar design to the Southern Pride. They did not give us a demo pit but did help us find some Ole Hickory Pit owners near us in North Carolina we could visit. The Ole Hickory management was also interested in the promotional value of having the Big Show Grilling team using their equipment. I liked the fact that the Ole Hickory Pit had heaver steel than Southern Pride. I was also impressed with the fact that almost all replacement parts could be purchased from Grainger or other local parts distributors. The pit was also easy to work on. I knew having a pit on a trailer bouncing up and down the road as much as we traveled had to be built good to take that punishment. It’s a big difference for a pit sitting on a restaurant kitchen floor and one riding a trailer every day!

We worked out a deal with Ole Hickory. Carl and Fred drove over to Cape Girardeau Missouri and picked up the trailer with the Ole Hickory Pit mounted. I met them back in Charlotte and we backed the trailer down the sidewalk to the front door of the Big Show studio. On their first break of the morning Billy walked out the door and saw the trailer and Ole Hickory Pit and the first word out of his mouth was “Grillzilla”. I said “you just named it” thanks!

It took almost a year to get Grillzilla built out the way it is today. We had several friends that built race cars and grills do the work. We also got another friend in the sign business to build the sides and put all the logos in place. All in we had maybe $60,000 in the total project. A big part of the expense was making mistakes. We had built on so many things that the weight over loaded the existing trailer suspension. That was a $3,000 fix in itself! The whole project was like a couple of red necks building something in their garage then discovering that it is too big to go out the door! I could build the next Grillzilla for half the money. Let me know if you want more details on a project like that.

Now keep in mind the entire project was started so we could be competitive in barbecue competitions. How did that work out? Not too good! The first competition we went to we finished third from last in total points. Ok, we would cut back on the party and really focus next time. At our second competition we finished bottom third (lot less partying too). As John Boy said “it’s hard to make this sound good if you guys finish last” and he was right. There is a lot more to competition cooking than the equipment. I would say the equipment is maybe 40% of the total picture.

We continued to competition cook without getting much better. I looked at the expense and decided maybe we should re-think this marketing strategy. We finally stopped competition cooking unless someone paid us to go.

The last few years we used Grillzilla for some Food City race night events around the two Bristol races and some big parties we had with radio stations but for the most part it stayed parked and was not used much. We were still doing a lot of grocery store events with our other grills but we found Grillzilla was just too big to fit in front of a grocery store. It also took lots of diesel fuel to pull it (8 MPG ).

When I sold my half of Big Show Foods to Carl we split the grills. Since Grillzilla was not used much by Big Show Foods it made more sense for me to take it so Carl could keep the “work horse” grills we called Grill #1 and Grill#2. For about a year Grillzilla was parked at my house. Every time I walked passed it I saw some new rust. I knew it was foolish not to be doing something with Grillzilla. That will start my next blog story about getting in trouble with the “food Police” (Wake County Health Department).

I have posted pictures of Grillzilla on my facebook page at http://facebook.com/tprice1 If we are not friends just ask. I am also publishing the pictures on my web site at http://bigtom.org.