23 BBQ Business Ideas You Can Start Today [2023]

We started the food truck business in 2012.

We kept finding it very difficult to find locations to operate. We had a booker that we used to find our locations but fell short and we let her go. I took over our booking and found that most people did not want to book just one truck, not only that they were upset that most of the time the trucks didn’t show up or were late.

We learned the real need was not only helping the trucks but providing a turnkey service for the corporations. This was a game-changer for us, we were really struggling financially.

In true Hipcooks fashion: I’m not a culinary school graduate — I’m a hack! Here’s my story:

I’m first-generation American (Mom is from Germany and Dad from Argentina). My parents were young foreign students in the US and their friends were the other international students: I was a kid surrounded by people from different nationalities, like Spain, Russia, France, and the UK. I was a child foodie and loved to experience culture through food.

I caught the travel bug early, living in Argentina (studying economics in college), traveling through Europe, and moved to England for graduate school (I have a Master’s in Economics from LSE.) While in school, I cooked my way through a series of London restaurants in the gastro-boom of the ’90s, just for fun. My first job was on the West Coast, as an econometrician at the RAND Corporation.

BBQGrills.com to me is a lot more than just an internet retailer of BBQ products, it’s a lifelong dream that I’ve had my heart set on since the age of 16. Like many entrepreneurs and business owners, I watched my Father own his own business my entire life. Man, to say that I’ve garnered everything I know about respecting customers, following through and how to successfully run a business through him, would be an incredible understatement, that man single-handedly made me the business owner that I am today.

For my past 30 years of life, my Father has owned and operated one of the largest and most respected pools and landscape companies in the East Bay, Bay Area. When I was roughly 13-14 years old I started working for his company (yes, I had a workers permit from my middle school), I don’t know what it was, but this idea of being able to make $200 a week and purchase a PSP over Summer break just seemed to be so ‘easy’ for me...boy was I wrong! I still remember his workers picking me up at 4 am that morning and me being half dead with a lunch box in hand walking out.

Just like a Father would he ensured he was awake that early to witness and I’ll never forget the words he told me “welcome to the first day of the rest of your life”, man he wasn’t kidding. While that Summer sun was hot and those paychecks were nice for a 14-year-old kid, I came obsessed with watching him run his business with my own eyes. When he’d happened to show up to a job site that I was at, I’d watch the way he’d talk with his clients, how they would listen and it was almost like you could see the respect being distributed, I loved that! It was right then that I knew, “that's what I want”.

For as long as I can remember I have always been attracted to the idea of being a business owner. I’ve tried many businesses starting with my own DJ company. I got some business cards, printed them at Staples, passed them out, and waited for the calls.

It took a bit of time, but eventually, the calls started to come in and bookings started to happen. I did that for a couple of years until one of the DJ gigs some gangsters got into it and I was almost in the middle of a gang fight. Thank GOD things calmed down, but after that, I started looking for another business!

During this same time, the whole tech bubble was growing and I wanted a part of it. I took some coding classes in college and started using HTML to code my website from scratch. I kind of borrowed a lot of ideas from Yahoo but it was going to be mainly focused on my local city. I visited some businesses and got some of them to advertise. Things seemed to be going well when the bubble burst and I was once more left to venture out and look for something else.

I am a licensed attorney in India and right after my master’s in law, I started working with a leading company as a lawyer. I worked there for about two years before I quit my job to become more location independent.

Choose a niche in whatever you start. It is critical for streamlining your efforts and make money.

My job paid me well but I worked 12 hours a day, I was exhausted by the end of each day, spent my weekends sleeping and I almost quit the things I liked to do - for example, sketching, yoga, traveling, etc.

Hi, I’m Andrei Calinescu and I am the Founder and CEO of One Life Meals.

Hi - I’m Jeremy Hendon, one of the co-founders of Nourishing Brands (a direct-to-consumer media company that operates popular sites like KetoSummit.com). My wife and I started the company just over 5 years ago to help people make the transition to eating a healthy diet easier and way more delicious.

Today, our main products are cookbooks (both digital and physical) and challenges and courses centered around various diets. To provide a bit of context, we sold over 300,000 cookbooks in 2020 alone. But our first really successful product in late 2016 was the Keto Summit, a digital summit with over 30 Keto experts.

My name is Brett Lindenberg and I started the mobile food entrepreneurship blog FoodTruckEmpire.com out of my one-bedroom apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota back in 2014. The first ever podcast recorded for the blog was with a hot dog vendor I found on YouTube. Fast forward to 2019 and I’ve now done over 100 interviews with food entrepreneurs.

In 2018, the website averaged $5,400 monthly. The website now gets over 300,000 page views monthly, has an email subscriber list of over 35,000 and continues to grow. We’ve been quoted in Entrepreneur Magazine, CNBC, and other media outlets over the years.

Huy Fong Foods is an American hot sauce manufacturer headquartered in Irwindale, California. In 1980, a Chinese immigrant from Vietnam named David Tran founded the brand.

The business has developed into one of the market leaders for Asian hot sauces, particularly Sriracha sauce, also known as rooster sauce, because of the rooster-themed label.

When Tran first began his business, he sold his sauces out of a blue Chevy van that he had filled with used baby food jars. In his first month, he earned $2300.

In 2019, Tran's Sriracha generated $150 million in revenue annually, accounting for 10% of the US market for hot sauce.

Read the full story on vietcetera.com ➜

My name is Michael “Medium Rare” O’Donnell and I’m the owner of Cave Tools and Grill Master University.

In 2017, we were ranked as the 3rd fastest growing company in Philadelphia and in 2018 we were ranked as the #453 fastest growing company on the Inc. 5000 list.

My name is Jeffrey Krentzman and The BBQ Cleaner was born in 2009. After cleaning BBQ grills in Northern New Jersey for the previous four years with our unique system, we felt fully confident we could show people in other markets how to replicate the same success we had. We were right! Now with over 240 locations across the United States, we are the largest and only successful grill cleaning business opportunity on the market.

We use the Ovenu system which has been used around the world successfully in 11 countries over 3 continents. We fill a large demand for people looking to get their grills cleaned and this system makes it easy to do, delivering a staggering 99% and higher customer satisfaction rate. So many locations are either making over 6 figures or have expanded into multi-unit locations just to keep up with the customer demand!