Texas Q's Sloan Rinaldi: From Construction to Global BBQ Media Empire

In the latest episode of The Building Texas Show, host Justin McKenzie sits down with Sloan Rinaldi, founder of Texas Q, a Houston-based barbecue brand offering sauces, rubs, custom cutting boards, and private barbecue crawl experiences. Rinaldi, a fourth-generation pitmaster whose family has been in barbecue since 1909, left a decades-long construction career at 50 and dove into the barbecue world after a transformative sliced brisket sandwich at Killen's Barbecue. She commissioned her own smoker, taught herself fire management, and quickly made her mark in competitions, including a 14th-place finish out of 250 teams at a Texas State Championship. She also landed a statewide deal with H-E-B for her original Texas Q sauce, then pulled it from shelves to reformulate without high fructose corn syrup—a testament to her commitment to quality.

Rinaldi is now expanding Texas Q into media. She's producing From Texas With Love: United We BBQ, a nine-episode series filming across eight countries and three continents, exploring live-fire traditions from Ibérico hogs to Japanese wagyu to Argentine gaucho asado. Each episode ends with a Texas barbecue collaboration, and the finale brings all featured cooks to Houston for a cook-off. She's also filming Grillz on Grills, a Houston culture series with Bun B, Slim Thug, Trae tha Truth, and Paul Wall, expected to launch on YouTube and possibly Netflix. Rinaldi's philosophy—that barbecue is the most uniting cuisine on earth—drives her mission. To hear her full story, watch the full conversation on YouTube. The episode is part of an ongoing series spotlighting Texas entrepreneurs and creators.