From Construction to Barbecue Empire: Sloan Rinaldi's Texas Q Story

Sloan Rinaldi's path to barbecue began with a single sliced brisket sandwich at Killen's Barbecue. At 50, she had just walked away from a decades-long career in construction, sold her business to longtime employees, and was unsure what came next. That sandwich changed everything. "I'd never cooked a brisket in my life," Rinaldi recalls. But it sparked a passion that led her to become a fourth-generation pitmaster—her family has been in barbecue since 1909, when they opened a shop in Crockett, Texas—and the founder of Texas Q, a brand built on sauces, rubs, and a growing media business. Rinaldi's journey wasn't without challenges. She noticed only one woman, Melissa Cookston, on the barbecue competition circuit, so she commissioned her own smoker from East Texas Smoker Company and taught herself fire management from scratch. Her first competition was at Bands, Brews and Barbecue, benefiting the Ronald McDonald House, where she finished 14th out of 250 teams at a Texas State Championship. That success led to a statewide deal with H-E-B for her original Texas Q sauce. However, she later pulled the product off shelves to reformulate it without high fructose corn syrup—a decision that reflects her commitment to quality. Based in Houston, Texas Q hosts private barbecue crawls and is expanding into media. Rinaldi's international reach is already substantial. 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 full day beforehand to prepare. 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 the end of the day, the conversation had moved from barbecue to business. Rinaldi believes barbecue has a unique power to unite people. "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," she says. That philosophy is the spine of her next project: 'From Texas With Love: United We BBQ,' a nine-episode series filming across eight countries and three continents, including Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Argentina, and Japan. It looks at live-fire cooking traditions from Ibérico hogs to Japanese wagyu to Argentine gaucho asado. Every episode ends with a Texas barbecue collaboration, and the final episode brings every featured cook to Houston for one last cook-off. Back home, she's also filming 'Grillz on Grills,' a new 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 Rinaldi 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, and Rinaldi says she'd like to bring it to Netflix too. This episode is part of The Building Texas Show's ongoing series spotlighting the entrepreneurs, tradespeople, and creators shaping Texas's economy and culture—from construction and home services to food and media. New episodes post 2-3 times a week. Listen to this Episode