When Craig Haley sat down with Marc Cohen and Rich Sweeney for the latest episode of Behind the Numbers, recorded live at the National Restaurant Association Show 2026, he brought the kind of number that defines a business: Smokey Mo’s BBQ sells over 1 million pounds of brisket a year, and brisket alone accounts for 50% of all the meat the brand sells. Haley is the President of Smokey Mo’s, a Texas barbecue concept with 22 restaurants across San Antonio and Austin and a 23rd opening the week after the episode taped. He has spent 27 years in barbecue, starting in 1999, and he came to the conversation with a decade of experience running restaurants on Restaurant365.
Barbecue sells by weight, and that makes yield the number Haley watches hardest. Buy a pound of raw brisket, cook it right, and you can sell roughly half a pound of it. Cook it past the pull point and the yield drops another couple of points. Every brisket takes 10 to 13 hours in the smoker, so a mistake made overnight is a mistake the store lives with all day. That math is why Smokey Mo’s treats yield management as a competitive weapon rather than a back-office chore.
A medium rare steak is done at 135 degrees. Brisket does not work that way. Smokey Mo’s cooks its brisket at 180 degrees and above for hours, and doneness is judged by tenderness rather than temperature. The team fork-tests every brisket in 5 or 6 different spots to confirm it is tender everywhere before it goes to the cutting board. Training that judgment takes reps: trainers walk new cooks through briskets that are right and briskets that are not, with plenty of tasting along the way, until the spec becomes muscle memory.
Haley’s sharpest systems point was about granularity. An overall food cost number can hide a serious problem, so Smokey Mo’s tracks actual versus theoretical on each individual meat. The team runs weekly inventories on every protein, checks the variances, and reports the results to the right people in each store. At barbecue yields, small errors compound fast: a cutter serving 0.27 pounds on a quarter-pound order is giving away 8% of the product on every ticket. Per-meat AvT catches that, and it also surfaces process problems and even supplier issues before they eat a month of margin. The cooks and the cutters drive the number, so waste tracking doubles as a coaching tool that tells a manager exactly who needs more training on the cutting board.
Every Smokey Mo’s location cooks its own barbecue on site with Southern Pride smokers burning post oak wood. Haley is direct about the alternative: commissary barbecue that gets chilled and reheated lands at what he calls school-lunch level, and the cool-down-reheat cycle costs significant additional yield on top of the quality loss. Off the pit, briskets rest in high-moisture holding cabinets so the product stays at its best until it is cut to order, against the grain, the same rule that separates a tender fajita from a chewy one.
The conversation turned to the market every barbecue operator is sweating: cattle stocks at record lows and beef costs that have climbed since Covid, sharply so in the last year. Haley’s answer is to out-manage the problem. Because Smokey Mo’s handles the product better, the brand has not had to raise prices as much as many other barbecue restaurants. One counterintuitive lever: buying upper choice brisket. The higher grade costs more, but the added marbling yields better than select or lower choice, and the yield gain pays for the upgrade. With guests already feeling sticker shock, Haley sees holding menu prices as both a guest-count strategy and a values decision.
Smokey Mo’s grew from founder Mo Melcher’s 1,100 square foot original in Cedar Park, which he built into 16 family-run stores before Haley’s team took the brand to 23. The small-box format is deliberate: stores are designed around guest flow and production efficiency, a significant share have drive-thrus, and 70% of sales go out the door. The speed target is five minutes or less from payment to food, which barbecue can hit precisely because the product is already cooked; the store just cuts, prepares, and assembles. Guests visit 8 to 9 times a year on average, with barbecue driving 6 to 7 of those visits and a loyal breakfast taco crowd showing up weekly or better.
After consolidating three POS systems into one in his first year, Haley applies a single filter to new technology: does it make the operation measurably better for the guest or the team? The change that cleared that bar most recently was guest feedback through Ovation, which puts actionable comments in front of management teams immediately and has improved the business significantly over the past few years. Next on his radar is AI order-taking in the drive-thru. He gives it a couple of years before Smokey Mo’s fully adopts, but he likes what AI does well: it never forgets to offer a drink or mention the loyalty program, and it frees the team to focus on hospitality.
Every episode ends with a hot take, and Haley aimed his at kiosks. He is not against them, and he concedes they work for guests who order the same thing every time. But he has watched kiosks slow restaurants down instead of speeding them up: a group of 4 or 5 people can take around 10 minutes to place a kiosk order that a professional order taker could ring in a couple of minutes. Kiosks are here to stay, he says, but plenty of operators have adopted them past the point where they help.
Smokey Mo’s BBQ operates 23 locations across San Antonio, Austin, and the Texas Hill Country, with more on the way. You can find Craig Haley on LinkedIn.
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