Ryan King: Jack Daniel's World Champion and BBQ World Cup Qualifier

On the Fourth of July in 2014, Ryan King was sitting with his dad in Jacksonville, Florida, watching an episode of BBQ Pitmasters.

Later that afternoon a young woman named Danette came over for the holiday and dropped a jar of honey in the front yard, and King went out to clean it up.

He has told the story the same way ever since. In one day, he says, the good Lord gave him a career and a wife.

The wife arrived first.

Danette married him in 2017 and sent him to Myron Mixon's barbecue school as a gift, which is how a Jacksonville home cook ended up in a classroom run by one of the most decorated pitmasters in the country.

King liked it enough to go back twice more. He came home with a foundation and one lesson he still repeats to anyone who asks.

Brisket is the meat that brings a contest home.

It is big, most cooks struggle with it, and getting it right moves your scores further than anything else on the table.

The career took another six years, and most of them hurt.

How Ryan King Started Kings BBQ: Four Years of Losing First

Kings BBQ started competing in 2018 under the Georgia Barbecue Association. Four contests, four beatings, in King's own summary of it.

Instead of pushing harder with the wrong gear, he pulled off the circuit entirely and spent the following year buying a trailer and the equipment a serious team needs.

He entered his first Kansas City Barbeque Society contest at the end of 2020 and got beaten again. From 2018 through 2020 he knew nothing but losing.

What came next is the part he tells on himself.

At a contest in western Florida, six hours from his driveway, King felt so bad about his cook that he loaded the trailer and left before the awards ceremony.

A cook parked next to him had taken his number earlier in the weekend.

The phone rang at six o'clock. You told me you never get your name called, the man said. You were called three times, and you finished in the top ten.

King almost turned the truck around. He has not left a contest before awards since, whether his name gets read or not.

A year later he went back to Swine at the Shrine, the contest where the losing had started, and won his first Grand Championship.

How Ryan King Turned Losses Into Grand Championships

The wins did not arrive in a clean line after that, and King is unusually direct about why.

At the South Carolina Festival of Discovery in 2024 he thought he had a strong cook, sat on his hands, and got beaten badly.

He went home and studied it. Something flipped.

He took a Grand Championship at the end of that year, and 2025 turned into the best season of his life.

He applies the same standard when it goes wrong now.

At the Lakeland Pig Fest earlier this year, the contest where he first met BBQ World Cup co-founders Shannon Pruitt and Scott Erdmann, King had been running a fever since the Wednesday before and rearranged his whole process to cook everything in a single day.

He did not hear his name.

He does not blame the weekend or the judges for it. He turned in barbecue that was not championship barbecue, he says, and the judges gave him exactly what he deserved.

That view has hardened into something close to a philosophy.

If a contest runs perfectly smoothly, King expects to do badly, because a smooth day usually means he missed something. If the pellet cooker quits and the drums run three hundred degrees hot, as they did at the Jack Daniel's, it is probably going to be a good day.

The job is to stick to the process while everything around it misbehaves.

A winner, he likes to say, is just a loser who never gave up.

Ryan King's Jack Daniel's Win and How He Qualified for the BBQ World Cup

In October 2025, Kings BBQ won the 36th Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational in Lynchburg, Tennessee, beating 91 invited teams from around the world for a $25,000 first prize.

King had spent most of that weekend certain it was slipping away. Equipment failed, the rubs were off, and he told Danette they might get lucky enough to be invited back next year.

Then the loudspeaker said Kings BBQ.

It felt, he told the St. Johns Citizen, almost like the Masters in golf, where everyone in the field is as good as you or better.

He was holding back tears until Darren Warth reached him first, wrapped him up and told him to take his time with it.

Then he started bawling.

Seven months later he cooked the weekend that sent him to Las Vegas.

At the KCBS World Open in Lebanon, Tennessee, the Wells Cup half of the World Invitational weekend, King cooked alone against a field of 117 teams and finished Grand Champion with 711.4172 points, nearly three points clear of the next team.

His brisket, the meat Mixon told him to master, scored a perfect 180. His chicken scored a perfect 180 as well.

That result carried a BBQ World Cup spot with it, which is how Kings BBQ ended up on the road to Las Vegas and a $1,000,000 cook in April 2027.

By his own June accounting, King has now cooked 72 KCBS contests and won nine Grand Championships since 2020. He runs 14 to 16 contests a year and still sits inside the top ten of the national KCBS Team of the Year standings.

Roughly 95 percent of the time he cooks by himself.

Why the Team Is Called Kings BBQ

Plenty of teams spend months hunting for a name.

King never had to.

His is on his birth certificate, and the local paper ran the obvious headline when he won the Jack: Long Live the King.

The food truck that debuted in 2020 is Kings BBQ, the KCBS scoresheets read Kings BBQ Team, and there is still no brick and mortar behind it, though he is looking for one now.

The crown fits him lightly.

Asked in a lightning round to name the greatest of all time in competition barbecue, King answered instantly with his own name, laughed, and then took it back. Until somebody knocks him off, he said, it is Darren Warth.

It was not false modesty. King talks about Warth, Tuffy Stone and Myron Mixon as the men who poured the concrete he gets to compete on, and he says most people never stop to think about what that first generation went through to build the sport.

Ryan King's Family, His Routine and His Plan for $1,000,000

His weekends have a shape he does not break.

King is at the pit by four in the morning with a cup of coffee and thirty minutes to himself, which he spends with God before he lights anything. At four thirty the fires go on.

He believes the mind has to be right before the meat does, and that against the best cooks in the country nothing else survives a bad head.

The people around him are the reason the alarm goes off.

Danette buys him a Nothing Bundt Cake every time he wins a Grand Championship, and the two of them eat it together when he gets home.

Fifteen nieces and nephews will look at anyone sideways for praising another barbecue joint. Four sisters-in-law put him on a pedestal, and his mom and dad think he can do no wrong, which he finds funny given how much wrong he has done.

The whole family watches the awards go up on Facebook and cannot understand why he does not simply win every time.

Two chocolate labs, Brody and Finley, come along when Florida gets cold enough and introduce themselves to every stranger on the lot.

One chair stays empty.

His younger brother Alan, who died in 2006, is the cooking partner he would pick over anyone living.

The two of them grew up cooking with the family and fishing before dawn, and King figures Alan is watching every contest and pointing out what he is doing wrong.

He pays the sport back on purpose.

King will talk to any stranger who walks up to his site, with one standing exception between eleven thirty and one thirty when the turn-in boxes are being built.

He teaches classes out of Jacksonville, coached a backyard team through a contest in West Virginia, and tells new cooks to join KCBS, sign up for something local, and expect to lose first. His advice is not to worry about that. You have to learn how to fail.

The cooks who came before him will not be here forever, he says, and it is his job to pull the next ones in.

So the plan for Las Vegas is not complicated.

If they call Kings BBQ to the stage in April 2027, King says he will hug Danette and cry, and then he will get out of town before the casino ever sees him.

What his team does after a win is what they did after the Jack. They find a Waffle House, order waffles, and sit there laughing until somebody puts on music.

He knows how that sounds next to $1,000,000 and a stage in Las Vegas.

He is going to take the money home, better himself with it, and eat waffles on the way.

Sources

Ryan King, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt, BBQ World Cup, June 2026. BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker (Grand Champion, KCBS World Open). KCBS World Open official scores, Lebanon TN, May 23 2026. First Coast News: Jacksonville's Kings BBQ wins the Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational. St. Johns Citizen: Long Live the King. KCBS Team of the Year standings, Master series, 2026. Kings BBQ, About. BBQ United team profile, Kings BBQ. Hero photo: Ryan King, BBQ World Cup pitmaster program.