South Africa Fired Up 500 Grills to Take the Biggest Braai Record Back From Japan

On September 24, a rugby stadium in Pretoria filled with smoke instead of scrums. Thousands of South Africans crowded onto the pitch at Loftus Versfeld, each one claiming a spot at one of 500 identical grills, and lit a fire. They were not there for a match. They were there to cook their country into the record books.

The target was the Guinness World Records title for the largest barbecue, a mark that belongs to Japan. To take it, everyone on that field had to keep meat over the coals at the same time, for at least five minutes, without wandering off. In a country where a braai is built around wandering off to talk to the next person, that turned out to be the whole challenge.

A record that fights how South Africans actually braai

South Africa had tried this before. In 2025, 2,412 people showed up for the same attempt and the record slipped away, because too many of them drifted from their grills to take photos and catch up with friends. Guinness never ratified it.

The rules leave no room for that. Everyone in the count has to be cooking at the same moment, for a minimum of five minutes, and anyone who steps away is disqualified, Guinness adjudicator Paulina Sapinska told reporters at the stadium. A braai is a slow, social thing, so a rule that pins every cook to a single spot cuts against the entire spirit of the gathering.

Dylan Jardim, head of marketing for the Big Save supermarket group that organized the attempt, learned that the first time around. “The whole purpose of a braai is socialising, so we did it the way we do it, but that’s not how they wanted it,” he said. Jardim had been building toward this for three years, and the 2025 near-miss told him exactly what to fix.

Big Save is a South African discount grocery chain, and a supermarket chasing a barbecue record is less strange than it looks. The braai is where the country buys its meat and its charcoal, so a grocer staking a national record on one is planting its flag on home ground. The prize is not a trophy anyone eats off. It is bragging rights, and a photograph of three thousand fires that no rival can match.

So the 2026 version came with structure. Organizers pre-lit every fire and pre-positioned the meat, so no cook had a reason to leave. Stewards, unofficially the braai cops, patrolled the rows to keep everyone at their stations for the full window. The cooking session opened at 09:00 and closed at 12:00, with the count that mattered landing mid-morning. Every grill held six cooks, which is how 500 stations become a crowd big enough to matter.

When the window opened, the field turned into one choreographed cook. Rows of grills lit close to the same moment, cooks flipped wors and chops shoulder to shoulder, and the smoke rose off the pitch in a single sheet. The five-minute hold was the test that broke 2025: everyone had to stay put, hands on tongs, while the adjudicator and the stewards worked the aisles and confirmed the count. For a tradition that treats the fire as a place to linger and talk, holding still on command was the unnatural part.

What Japan set, and what Pretoria wanted back

The record South Africa was chasing stands at 2,220 people grilling at once, set in Ishigaki City, Japan, in 2023. To beat it cleanly, Loftus aimed for 3,000 cooks across 500 custom braais, six people to a grill.

Mass-participation cooking records are their own strange sport. They are less about skill than about logistics, headcount, and following the letter of a rulebook, which is why the hard number is always the simple one: how many people were confirmed, over a live fire, at the exact same time. Guinness sends an adjudicator to watch, count, and rule, and the evidence gets reviewed long after the last coal dies.

That gap between 2,220 and 3,000 is the whole story. A country does not casually put three thousand people on a stadium field with live fire. It takes a plan, a venue that can hold the crowd, and a reason for all of them to show up on the same morning. Loftus Versfeld, the home of Pretoria rugby, gave the attempt its scale and its stage.

Entry ran 255 rand, about 16 US dollars, sold through the Howler platform. The ticket was less a seat than a starter kit: a pre-lit braai station, a coil of boerewors, a bread roll or a scoop of pap, a pair of tongs, and a branded apron. Everything a cook needed to be counted, handed over at the gate, so the only job left was to stand there and grill.

What a braai actually is

A braai is the South African word for cooking over live fire, and it is closer to a national habit than a menu. The word comes from the Afrikaans braaivleis, grilled meat, and over generations it spread across the whole country, from backyard grills to the township shisa nyama where meat is bought and cooked on the spot. It is how weekends start, how sport gets watched, and how strangers become guests.

The fire has to be real. “Gas is a definite no-no in South Africa,” the custom holds; it has to be charcoal or wood, over an open flame. Boerewors, a thick coiled sausage seasoned heavy with coriander, is the centerpiece, joined by steak and pork and lamb chops, with pap, a maize porridge, on the side. The cooking is unhurried, and the standing around the fire is the point, which is exactly why a stopwatch-strict world record is so hard to pull off at one.

The date was chosen with care. September 24 is Heritage Day, and since 2005 it has doubled as National Braai Day, an idea pushed by Jan Scannell, better known as Jan Braai, to get the country gathering around fires on the same afternoon. He turned an ordinary public holiday into a standing invitation to light a fire, and two decades on it is one of the busiest cooking days on the South African calendar. A record attempt built on 500 grills is that idea taken to its largest possible size.

Still cooking

By the time the smoke cleared at Loftus, the result was not in. Guinness officials were still counting heads and reviewing the evidence, and the final word was not expected until later in the week. A festival kept the stadium going into the evening while the paperwork caught up with the fires.

The mood on the field did not wait for it. Alex Coetzee, who had been part of the 2025 attempt that fell short, was already sure. “We’re actually gonna break the world record now,” he said. “South Africans have the record and that’s the most important part.”

Whether the number survives Guinness scrutiny or not, the picture is the same. A rugby stadium became one enormous open-air kitchen, 500 fires lit at once, and a country treated its everyday cookout as something worth chasing a world title over. The record is the excuse. The braai is the reason.

Sources

NPR, “Thousands of people gather for a South African barbecue, aiming to set a world record”; The Associated Press via WSLS, “Fire up the grills! Thousands of South Africans try to set a record for the biggest cookout”; The Citizen, “SA takes another shot at world’s biggest braai record on Heritage Day”; The Rio Times, “World Record Braai Attempt Set for 24 September 2026”. Image courtesy Big Save / Loftus Versfeld coverage.