Sloan Rinaldi: From Construction to Texas BBQ Empire and Global Series

Sloan Rinaldi, founder of Texas Q, is a fourth-generation pitmaster whose family barbecue roots trace to Crockett, Texas in 1909. After years in construction, she walked away at 50, sold her business to longtime employees, and found her next calling in an unlikely place: a sliced brisket sandwich at Killen's Barbecue. That single meal led her to commission a smoker from East Texas Smoker Company, teach herself fire management, and enter competitions—where she noticed only one woman, Melissa Cookston, on the circuit. Her first competition, Bands, Brews and Barbecue benefiting the Ronald McDonald House, was followed by a 14th-place finish out of 250 teams at a Texas State Championship.

Rinaldi's Texas Q, based in Houston, now produces sauces, rubs, and custom cutting boards, and hosts private barbecue crawls. She landed a statewide deal with H-E-B for her original sauce, then pulled it off shelves to reformulate without high fructose corn syrup—a decision that reflects her commitment to quality over short-term sales. That same ethos drives her media ventures. She is filming From Texas With Love: United We BBQ, a nine-episode series across eight countries and three continents, including Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Argentina, and Japan. Each episode explores a local live-fire tradition—from Ibérico hogs to Japanese wagyu to Argentine gaucho asado—and ends with a Texas barbecue collaboration. The finale brings every featured cook to Houston for a cook-off.

Rinaldi's international reach is already tangible. She recently hosted two Taiwan-based venture capitalists on a private Texas Q barbecue crawl in Houston; they flew 15 hours and fasted for a day beforehand. The itinerary included one of only three Michelin-starred barbecue restaurants in the world, plus two Top 15 stops, one of them Top 10. By day's end, conversation had shifted from barbecue to business. For Texas, this signals how food can serve as an economic bridge, drawing foreign investment and tourism while showcasing the state's culinary innovation.

Back home, Rinaldi is filming Grillz on Grills, a Houston culture series with Bun B, Slim Thug, Trae tha Truth, and Paul Wall. It digs into the city's food, music, and custom-grillz scene, which she says has gone global. She and her co-host get their own custom grillz built during the series. The show is expected to launch on YouTube, with Rinaldi hoping to bring it to Netflix.

Rinaldi's philosophy underscores why this matters: "You can put the richest guy and the poorest guy at the same table, having the same meal. You can't get that in any other cuisine. So it is the most uniting cuisine or culinary culture on earth." That belief is the spine of her work, from sauce bottles to international TV. Her journey from construction to pitmaster demonstrates how Texas entrepreneurs can pivot, scale, and export culture. The implications for the state's economy are clear: barbecue is not just food—it's a global business card, attracting venture capital, media attention, and tourism. As Rinaldi builds her media empire, she's also building a bridge between Texas and the world, one brisket at a time.

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