We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mat Griner. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mat below.

Mat, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. Quality control is a challenge almost every entrepreneur has had to focus on when growing – any advice, stories or insight around how to best ensure quality is maintained as your business scales?

If I’m cooking for 10 or 1000 i never let myself get rushed. I take my time with each cook to ensure that I’m turning out the same product to my customers each and every time.. It may take me a little longer in my prep or cooking times but we win in the long run when our customers are happy and continue to do business with us.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

Mat Griner owner/Pitmaster of Southern Q . We are a BBQ Catering and Food Trailer business as well as a Professional Cook team that competes mainly throughout the Southeast.

I started competing professionally in September of 2012 and it didn’t take long to get the bit by the bug of competition BBQ.. In 2017, I left my job of 23 years at a Caterpillar dealership to pursue my dreams of owning my own company and cooking full time. I left without one job booked and to say it wasn’t scary at first would be telling a lie.

The good Lord blessed me a few months into it and our catering business exploded over the next several years.. Then Covid hit. We lost every cater for the year in a few days. It took me a few days to process this and figure out what we were going to do as I was determined not to give up this dream of mine. We put our food trailer to work full time and ran the wheels off of it trying to keep up with the demand. This was another blessing from the good Lord as it increased our business dramatically and since then we have been voted top 5 best BBQ and best Food Truck in the area 2020, 2021, and 2022. Not too shabby for a little ole catering company and food trailer.

Some other blessings we have received in the last few years was being featured on the Discovery Channels Moonshiner’s Smoke Ring where we stuck to our roots of BBQ and cooked a traditional Eastern NC Whole Hog on our episode. We were also a member of Myron Mixon’s 2021 World Championship BBQ team at Memphis in May. That was just the pinnacle of my BBQ career and I’ll never forget that.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Covid……it was bad for everyone. It wiped out the catering industry which was a very large part of our business. Fortunately we had a food trailer. Made some adjustments to the menu so that we could get the correct orders out the window fast and efficient. Running a food truck is twice the work and a big gamble each time you go out. We WORKED OUR BUTTS off through Covid and refused to let it beat us and give up on my dream of owning my own business. We continue today to work hard and provide the very best we can to each of our customers. Covid taught us a lot, it also helped me understand that I can dig deeper when I need to and not let anything stand in our way of success.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

We learned pretty quickly that good quality pictures of our products can go a long way on social media. Time and time again we hear, “your food on your post looks amazing” . They saw that picture, and either hired us for a cater or came out to a food trailer event and bought food from us, all from seeing a good picture.

Contact Info:

• Website: Southernqcatering.com
• Instagram: MGriner34
• Facebook: Southern Q