Heath Riles: Memphis in May Grand Champion and BBQ World Cup Qualifier
At seventeen he welded his own grill in Ashland, Mississippi and set a goal to win Memphis in May. Nearly thirty years later Heath Riles won it twice in a row. Next: the BBQ World Cup and a cook for $1,000,000 in Las Vegas.
In 1997, a teenager from Ashland, Mississippi set himself a goal: one day he would win Memphis in May.
Heath Riles was cooking on a borrowed pit back then, with two buddies and more enthusiasm than know-how. It took him almost thirty years to get there.
In May 2025 he was named Grand Champion at Memphis in May, and in May 2026 he did it again, the first cook in 42 years to win it back to back.
That second win carried a seat among the hundred teams headed to the BBQ World Cup in Las Vegas, where Heath Riles BBQ will cook for $1,000,000.
Where Heath Riles Learned to Cook: Ashland, Mississippi
Cooking was in the house long before competition was.
Heath's father was a lawman and a proud member of the volunteer fire department, later the elected county coroner, and in a small town that meant fundraisers. There were soup and stew suppers, half chickens and Boston butts, and the Riles family helped at all of them.
At home his dad had a grill custom made by a man in town, and the holidays and family reunions ran on it.
Heath noticed early how the work divided. In the kitchen it was his grandmother, his mother and his aunt. Outside, at the fire, it was always the men, and a boy watching that decides pretty quickly where he wants to stand.
Ask him today for the best meal he has ever eaten and he does not name a contest box. He names his grandmother's cooking, with vegetables straight out of the garden.
Between her kitchen and his father's grill, he says, cooking got rooted in him.
How Heath Riles Got Into Competition BBQ at 17
The competition side arrived when he was seventeen, through a friend's uncle named Don who had a barbecue team and a fresh divorce. To a high school kid, that made Don excellent company.
He took the boys to one of the big money cookoffs of the day, the kind with a fifty thousand dollar purse and a car to give away, and Heath fell in love with all of it.
He spent his senior year helping Don wherever Don would have him.
By about the third contest, the boys figured they knew what they were doing. Don went out of town and loaned them his pit for the hometown cookoff in Ashland, and three teenagers ran a team on their own for the first time.
With a father in law enforcement, Heath recalls, they collected a few warnings that weekend. They also finished in the middle of the pack, which felt like a victory.
When Don got home he told them that if they were going to carry on like that, they needed to do it on their own.
Heath had taken welding in school. So he built his first grill himself and went to a contest with it.
Those were the fun years, he says, when nobody was serious and it was somebody else's money.
Why the Team Is Called Heath Riles BBQ
The serious years came next. Heath cooked on other people's teams and under other people's banners, most recently as Victory Lane BBQ, and he won a great deal.
He was named Memphis Barbecue Network Team of the Year more than once, and in a single season he took twelve Grand Champion titles in thirteen Memphis Barbecue Network contests.
But he had started to feel that his work was spread across too many names. He wanted one thing that was his.
The advice that settled it came from two men he calls the pioneers of the barbecue business, Sweet Baby Ray and Famous Dave Anderson.
They told him the same thing: change the name to your name. Forget the clever team name.
So the team name story for this qualifier is the simplest one in the field, and maybe the boldest.
Heath Riles BBQ is called that because two of the biggest names in barbecue told Heath Riles to bet on himself, and he listened.
The bet was real money.
He had been selling homemade rubs on the side, enough that he thought the idea deserved a proper chance, so he put $28,000 on his American Express card.
"I'm either gonna make it in barbecue," he told himself, "or I'm gonna pay five hundred bucks a month to pay for this mistake."
He calls it a little foolish now. At the time he had no big truck payment and few bills, and he decided there would never be a better moment.
Then he went to work the unglamorous way.
Every day he sat with a phone and a computer in his lap, looked up another barbecue store, and called it. Some owners knew who he was. Some did not.
If a shop wanted half a case, he sold half a case. If it wanted four bottles, he sold four bottles. If it wanted samples, he put them in the mail.
About three and a half months in, the business was paying for itself, and it has ever since.
The Heath Riles BBQ Business: Family, Staff and 25,000 Stores
It did not stay a one man operation for long.
His wife, Candace, was a nurse, and during the pandemic the job became too much just as Heath badly needed help. She came to work with him.
A couple of months later they hired someone for the office, then someone for social media, and it kept going.
Today Heath Riles BBQ has fifteen or sixteen employees, and by his count its rubs, sauces and seasonings sit in about 25,000 retail locations.
He is a father of two, a 21 year old son and a four year old daughter, and the family holds college football season tickets.
What he talks about is the tailgate: his son and his son's girlfriend coming around on weekends for dinner and ball games with the little one in tow.
He knows how lucky a dad is when a grown son still wants to hang out.
His corner in barbecue is just as clear.
He talks to Sweet Baby Ray more than anyone. And he will never leave out Pat Burke, whom he calls one of the greatest cooks ever born, or the late Mike Mills.
One of the moments he holds closest is a night at Praise the Lard in Murphysboro, Illinois, when those two took the time to talk with him after the awards.
Another came in Vienna, Georgia, when he became only the second cook from outside the state to win the Big Pig Jig. By his telling the first was Pat Burke, and Burke phoned him that night to say congratulations.
Heath Riles at Memphis in May: Back-to-Back Grand Champion
Not every memory is a win.
The one he cannot shake is a Sam's Club finals where he opened with a perfect 180 in chicken and a perfect 180 in ribs, then watched his pork land on a table that sank everyone it touched. He finished fifth, a fraction of a point from a much bigger check.
He was so heartsick he could not drive all the way home. He pulled off, found a hotel, and started again in the morning.
Which is what he has always done.
These days the business keeps him off the road more than he would like, so he picks his spots: Memphis in May, and a tune up or two before it.
He describes his approach as a light switch. He will go to dinner and laugh with anybody on a contest weekend, but when it is time to cook, everything runs off spreadsheets and the clock.
The results say it works.
Heath has cooked Memphis in May since 2008, and he has now won ribs there four times in five years, in 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026, to go with the two Grand Champion titles.
Nobody had won it in consecutive years since John Willingham in 1983 and 1984.
For all that precision, his view of the people around him is generous.
Cooks are competitors, he says, for the fifteen minutes they are building a blind box. The rest of the weekend, whatever a neighbor needs is theirs.
"I would rather give you something that I have and lose to you," he says, "than tell you I don't have it and lose to you."
What Heath Riles Would Do With $1,000,000 at the BBQ World Cup
Heath is plain about what sets the BBQ World Cup apart.
He has cooked for big purses, and he says $1,000,000 is life changing money, the kind of prize that puts new eyes on the whole sport.
He would treat it the way he treats everything else now. Most of it would go into real estate and back into the business, with a little held out for a good hunting trip, because a man with a family looks to the future.
He is a rib guy and a stick burner man, Memphis style first with Texas close behind.
Asked for the greatest of all time, he names two cooks he will see in Las Vegas, Darren Warth and Brad Leighninger, and calls it neck and neck.
His walkout song will probably be AC/DC.
Ask his family to describe him and the first two words are "hardworking" and "determined."
Great barbecue, he says, comes from the people making it, the story behind it, and the passion that goes into the cook.
His own story started with a seventeen year old welding a grill together in Ashland, Mississippi, and a goal that took the better part of three decades.
Next it goes to Las Vegas, under his own name.
Sources
Heath Riles, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup), recorded October 1, 2026. BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker (#15 Heath Riles BBQ, head cook Heath Riles, Memphis in May, Grand Champion). Heath Riles BBQ, "Back to Back at Memphis in May" (2026) and About Us (Ashland, Mississippi; Candace; first overall ribs 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026; first back to back Grand Champion in 42 years). BBQ Island pitmaster biography (Memphis Barbecue Network Team of the Year honors, twelve of thirteen, Big Pig Jig, the move from Victory Lane BBQ to Heath Riles BBQ). Family history, the first contests, the credit card, the retail and staff figures, the Sam's Club finals, Praise the Lard and the Pat Burke call per Riles's qualifier interview.