The ‘Meat Teacher’ From South Jersey Has 3.7 Million TikTok Followers. Now He’s Cooking for $50,000 on Food Network.

Matt Groark spends his school days in a South Jersey classroom and the rest of his life in front of a smoker. Somewhere in between, he became one of the most-followed barbecue personalities in the country. His students know him as a teacher. Several million strangers know him as “The Meat Teacher,” the man who films himself trimming brisket and building oversized backyard cooks. This summer both versions of him landed in the same place: a national television set, cooking against elite live-fire cooks for a five-figure prize.

Groark teaches at Washington Township High School in Gloucester County and runs Groark Boys’ BBQ out of Sewell, New Jersey. Online he is enormous. His accounts carry 3.7 million followers on TikTok alone, plus 1.9 million on Facebook, more than a million on YouTube, and over half a million on Instagram, a combined audience north of seven million. In July he joined the cast of Pitmasters, Food Network’s new barbecue competition, as one half of a two-person team, putting all of that behind a run at the title and up to $50,000.

Barbecue’s map does not usually run through South Jersey. The tradition’s heartlands are Texas, the Carolinas, Kansas City, and Memphis, and a cook from Gloucester County is a long way from any of them. That distance is part of what makes Groark’s rise notable. He built a national barbecue audience from a state better known for diners and pork roll, proof that the craft no longer belongs only to its old regions. The smoker travels, and so does the following.

The show that never stops cooking

Pitmasters premiered July 13 and is built to hurt. Nine two-person teams cook over live fire in a nonstop, week-long format, working from sunrise to sunset to sunrise again as the field thins out. The concept trades the tidy studio kitchen for something closer to an endurance test, where dying coals and lost sleep matter as much as seasoning. Episodes air Mondays on Food Network and stream the next day on HBO Max. The format rewards cooks who can hold their technique together when they are exhausted, which is a different skill than nailing one perfect brisket on a rested morning.

The judging table is stacked with names that carry weight in the barbecue world. Andrew Zimmern, the James Beard-winning host who built his career on Bizarre Foods, anchors it. Beside him sits Jess Pryles, the Australian-born, Texas-based live-fire authority who founded the Hardcore Carnivore brand and holds a graduate certificate in meat science from Iowa State. Moe Cason, the self-taught Iowa pitmaster who has cooked in more than 250 competitions, judges alongside Ernest Servantes, whose Burnt Bean Co. in Seguin was named the best barbecue joint in Texas by Texas Monthly in 2025. For a teacher from New Jersey, that is the panel to convince.

Those four cover the whole map of American barbecue. Servantes and Pryles bring the Texas beef gospel, salt and pepper and post oak. Cason carries the competition-circuit pedigree, where a single overcooked rib can end a weekend. Zimmern brings the wider palate of a chef and traveler who has eaten fire-cooked food around the world. Pleasing one of them is hard. Pleasing all four at once, on no sleep, is the real test of the show.

Who Matt Groark is

Groark did not arrive on television as an unknown. He appeared on the second season of Fox’s Next Level Chef in 2023, cooking inside Gordon Ramsay’s format, and walked away with a bigger platform than he came in with. Back home he kept teaching and kept filming, turning Groark Boys’ BBQ into a content engine that treats brisket, ribs, and absurd backyard builds as entertainment. The nickname stuck because it is literally true. He grades papers and he grades barbecue, and his audience likes that he never dropped the day job.

Groark Boys’ BBQ started as a passion project and grew into a brand. Out of Sewell he cooks and sells barbecue, drops merch, and posts a steady stream of videos that treat a rack of ribs like a story with a beginning, a middle, and a payoff. The pitch is simple and it travels: a real teacher who happens to be obsessed with smoke, showing regular people how to do it without pretending it is easy. That mix of approachable and expert is why the accounts kept climbing while plenty of slicker food channels stalled.

His partner on Pitmasters is Max McGibbon, a Delaware cook who recently stepped away from a corporate career to chase food full time. The pairing sets a self-made online star next to a career-changer, two people betting a week of no sleep on the belief that they belong in a national field. Neither is a legacy competition name, which is part of the appeal. They are the kind of cooks the internet minted, standing in front of judges the old circuit minted.

How barbecue TV got here

Barbecue television is not new. The original BBQ Pitmasters put the competition circuit on cable back in 2009, following pit crews through contests and turning names like Myron Mixon into stars. Food Network later built BBQ Brawl around Bobby Flay and Michael Symon, and the genre settled into a familiar rhythm of studio cooks and celebrity mentors. What has changed is who the audience already follows. The newest cohort of barbecue stars did not wait for a network to discover them.

Groark is the clearest example. His seven-million-follower reach did not come from television. He built it himself, phone in one hand and thermometer in the other, which means he arrives on Pitmasters with a crowd already watching. When a creator like that competes, the show borrows his audience and his audience discovers the show. The line between social-media cook and television cook keeps dissolving, and casting a high school teacher with millions of followers is what that looks like in practice.

What is on the line

The week-long grind favors nobody by reputation. A famous following does not keep a fire alive at three in the morning, and a viral video does not trim a brisket. Groark and McGibbon get judged on the same meat as everyone else, cooked in the same brutal window, which is exactly the equalizer a competition like this is built to be. The prize runs up to $50,000, but the real stake for Groark is proof. He has spent years as the most-watched barbecue teacher on the internet, a title that quietly invites the question of whether the following outgrew the cooking. This is where that gets answered.

There is a smaller stake too, and it may matter more to the people closest to him. For the students heading back to his classroom this fall, their teacher spent the summer on national television, cooking for real money against the best in the country. Most teachers assign the lesson. This one went out and lived it.

Sources

NJ.com, via AOL: ‘The Meat Teacher,’ a South Jersey local, joins new Food Network show.

Food Network: Pitmasters show page.

Warner Bros. Discovery: Food Network’s July premieres, including Pitmasters.

Texas Monthly: in Food Network’s Pitmasters, the competition never stops.

CultureMap Austin: Jess Pryles to judge the new Food Network barbecue show.

Nonpareil: Iowa pitmaster Moe Cason returns to TV.

Texas Monthly: Burnt Bean Co. in Seguin, Ernest Servantes.

Image: courtesy Groark Boys’ BBQ.