Stan Hays was working in insurance in Missouri when the idea first came to him. It was May 2011, and a tornado had just battered the town of Joplin. He felt the urge to help. So he called up a friend, Jeff Stith. Both men shared a common skill: They were pitmasters on competitive barbecue teams.
"I thought, who better than some guys who set up in parking lots every weekend to bring a comfort meal?" Hays says.
They put out a call on social media, and by noon the following day, a dozen of his buddies had answered. The team drove to the town, setting up their smokers amid extensive damage — roofs torn off houses, and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. Hays thought they would have a cookout for three or four days before they ran out of supplies. But "whenever we needed something, it seemed to appear," he says. They stayed for 11 days and served 120,000 meals.
With that, Operation BBQ Relief was born: a roving band of competitive barbecue team members, their loved ones and others traveling to disaster zones across the country, ready to whip up thousands and thousands of hot and tangy meals for people in need. Eight years after that first tornado, the operation has served nearly 3 million meals across 26 states and has "deployed" to 60 disasters.
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