What Is Up With The BBQ World Cup?

A Huge Prize Package and Many Unanswered Questions

The competition barbecue world has been all abuzz since late December, when Christie Vanover, a competition champion and social media personality, posted on Instagram that “Something Big is Coming.”

That big something is the new BBQ World Cup, which will be held in Las Vegas in 2027, and the winner will take home . . . wait for it . . . one million dollars.

The one million dollar part got people’s attention. By comparison, the grand champion at Memphis in May received $27,000 in 2025, and the top prizes at the Jack Daniel’s World Championship and the American Royal were $25,000 and $15,000, respectively.

You may recall that it was just two years ago that SmokeSlam (“The World’s Ultimate BBQ Showdown”) announced it was taking over Memphis in May’s former spot in Tom Lee Park on the banks of the Mississippi and would be offering an unprecedented $250,000 total prize purse, with $50,000 going to the grand champion. After a brief two year run, SmokeSlam announced on January 13 that it would not be returning for 2026.

The BBQ World Cup appears to be taking a page from the SmokeSlam playbook and turning it up to 11. The organization has announced its Pitmaster Competition Committee, described as “the governing body of the BBQ World Cup” that will set the official standards for the competition. It’s made up of 13 well-known champions from the competition circuit, including Vanover, Bill Gillespie of Smokin’ Hoggz BBQ, and Darren Warth of Smokey D’s BBQ.

To date, 23 regional competitions in the United States and 12 international events have been announced as qualifiers, with the top two or three teams at each earning an invitation to the big show. (You have to go to Instagram to find the full list, since only five are currently listed on the World Cup web site.)

Interestingly, the people behind the BBQ World Cup come not from the barbecue scene but from the world of professional sports sales and marketing. Co-Founder and CEO Scott Erdmann was Senior Director for Corporate Partnership Sales for the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders and for the Dallas Cowboys before that. Co-Founder & President Shannon Pruitt was the Global Chief Marketing Officer for Stagwell, a network of digital and social media marketing agencies with an emphasis on live sports.

Their stated goals are much loftier than simply staging a big barbecue competition. The founders’ bios cite an aim “to modernize barbecue into a global sport and lifestyle brand” and create “a global, fan-driven barbecue league and digital platform redefining competitive food as sport and entertainment.” What exactly that means isn’t clear yet.

Frequently Asked But Not Yet Answered

Some of the haziness comes from a lack of attention to detail. All 13 members of the Pitmaster Committee, for instance, are identified as “Committee Chairperson,” which is an unorthodox way to structure a committee. Other issues are more material.

The money part, for instance. The initial launch video clearly states, “The grand champion is going to take home one million dollars,” and a message reposted on the Cup’s Instagram feed refers to the “1 million winner take all finals in Vegas!” Another Instagram post, however, cites a “$1 million pot,” and the web site’s About page specifies a “$1M Prize Pool.”

Will the winner receive the full million and the rest get bupkis, or does the money get divvied up among the top finishers, as in most competitions? It’s not an insignificant detail, since some teams are already adjusting their 2026 schedules to participate in one of the qualifying events. The FAQ page notes that for invited teams to participate there will be “a standard qualification fee paid to the BBQ World Cup,” but it doesn’t say how much that fee will be.

The other FAQs, unfortunately, are frequently not answered, either. How many total teams will compete in the World Cup? What are the categories and competition rules? How much will tickets cost for fans to attend? When in 2027 and where in Las Vegas will the World Cup will take place? All those trivial details “will be announced soon.”

The Digital Home We’ve All Been Waiting For

Since there’s not much other information to go on, I spent a little time scrolling through the BBQ World Cup web site, which has been branded, “BBQ United — the digital home for everyone who loves BBQ.” It just gets weirder from there.

You would think that staging a flashy barbecue competition with the largest prize purse ever seen would be enough, but apparently not. BBQ United declares itself to be “a global barbecue platform that connects BBQ restaurants, food trucks, pitmasters, brands, and fans in one place.” The “About BBQ United” page advises, “Think of us as ESPN meets Yelp for BBQ—with the $1M BBQ World Cup as our championship stage.”

So far, in addition to the incomplete information about the World Cup event, this “global barbecue platform” consists of a Community page and The Feed. The Community page is a work in progress that asserts the company is building the following:

For competition teams: “the ultimate global directory for BBQ teams” to increase their visibility, connect with other pitmasters, and stay informed about upcoming competitions

For restaurants, food trucks, and catering companies: “the world’s most comprehensive global barbecue platform” that will “go beyond a simple restaurant directory” and help connect them with customers worldwide

For “pitmasters, creators, journalists, and event leaders”: a chance to join a “global network” of BBQ World Cup Ambassadors and receive early updates and “creator opportunities”

That all sounds pretty impressive, but so far the “register” buttons in each section just open the same generic “Contact Us” form where you submit your name, email, and optional phone number. I have no idea what happens after that.

Then there’s The Feed, “the official BBQ World Cup fan hub.” The introductory copy claims the feed is “packed with videos, recipes, pitmaster stories, event highlights, and behind-the-scenes content created for BBQ fans around the world.” The About page adds that it offers “competition results across all sanctioning bodies (KCBS, IBCA, SCA), championship techniques from top pitmasters, new restaurant openings, gear reviews, and BBQ culture stories. Updated daily.”

That’s a pretty wide range of material — and updated daily? The company must have put together a substantial digital media operation that can really crank out the content.

Or maybe not. The Feed is currently populated with 40 articles, all of which posted on January 30th and all of which are — pardon my French — merde. Each is four short paragraphs of vacuous generalities, and when it comes to anything touching on barbecue history, the information is consistently incorrect (often laughably so.) I would claim that these “articles” must have been written by ChatGPT or some other generative AI tool, but ChatGPT rarely writes that poorly. (I started to give an example here of this truly remarkable content but decided to save that for Burnt Ends. See below.)

I find it all a bit baffling. If you are aspiring to be the biggest and best competition out there — “the world’s biggest barbecue stage” — why come out of the gate with something so slipshod and amateurish?

For now, though, I’ll give the BBQ World Cup the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they got a bit out over their skis and rushed the launch announcement before all the details were finalized and the technology fully in place. Hopefully as things get more built out the substance will start to live up to the hype.

The devil, of course, is in the details, and for now we’re still waiting for them. I was excited to see that CEO Scott Erdmann was booked to appear on Greg Rempe’s BBQ Central Show on January 27, but he ended up canceling last minute. Apparently he got the time zones mixed up and was double booked with something else. (See “attention to detail” above.)

And so we wait.

This dispatch was originally published in the Robert F. Moss Newsletter on Substack. Subscribe today for free to have his latest writing delivered straight to your inbox.