Sloan Rinaldi, founder of the Houston-based barbecue brand Texas Q, is expanding her culinary footprint from local sauces and rubs to international television. In a recent episode of The Building Texas Show, hosted by Justin McKenzie and recorded live at the San Antonio Home & Garden Show, Rinaldi detailed her journey from a construction career to a fourth-generation pitmaster and her plans to take Texas barbecue worldwide.
Rinaldi's family has been in barbecue since 1909, when they opened a shop in Crockett, Texas. After selling her construction business to longtime employees at age 50, she was unsure of her next move. A sliced brisket sandwich at Killen's Barbecue changed everything. She commissioned her own smoker from East Texas Smoker Company, taught herself fire management, and entered competitions. She placed 14th out of 250 teams at a Texas State Championship and landed a statewide deal with H-E-B for her original Texas Q sauce. She later pulled the product to reformulate without high fructose corn syrup.
Now, Rinaldi is focused on media. Her next project, From Texas With Love: United We BBQ, is a nine-episode series filming across eight countries and three continents, including Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Argentina, and Japan. Each episode explores a different live-fire cooking tradition, from Ibérico hogs to Japanese wagyu to Argentine gaucho asado, and ends with a Texas barbecue collaboration. The final episode will bring every featured cook to Houston for a cook-off.
Rinaldi's international reach is already tangible. 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. The itinerary included one of only three Michelin-starred barbecue restaurants in the world and two Top 15 stops, one of them Top 10. By day's end, the conversation had shifted from barbecue to business. Rinaldi shares which cities are now in play in the full episode, which can be viewed on YouTube. For media inquiries, Email Contact is available.
Back in Houston, Rinaldi is filming Grillz on Grills, a new culture series with Bun B, Slim Thug, Trae tha Truth, and Paul Wall. The show examines 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. It is expected to launch on YouTube, and Rinaldi says she'd like to bring it to Netflix too.
Rinaldi believes barbecue's power lies in its ability to unite. "You can put the richest guy and the poorest guy at the same table, having the same meal," she said. "You can't get that in any other cuisine. So it is the most uniting cuisine or culinary culture on earth." That philosophy drives her media expansion.
The implications for the barbecue industry and beyond are significant. Texas barbecue is already a cultural export, but Rinaldi's series and international business meetings suggest a new phase of global commercialization. For entrepreneurs, her pivot from construction to food media demonstrates how to leverage a regional culinary tradition into a scalable brand. For the food world, it highlights the growing appetite for authentic live-fire cooking and cross-cultural exchange. As Rinaldi's projects gain traction, they may open doors for other pitmasters and food creators to think beyond local markets. The series also positions Houston as a global barbecue destination, potentially boosting tourism and investment in the city's culinary scene.
