Stan Hays - Operation BBQ Relief - Encore

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It's time for Barbecue Nation with JT.

So file up your grill like the charcoal and get your smoker cooking.

Now, from the Turnit Go Burnage Studios in Portland, use JT.

This is an Enquire.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Nation.

That's Barbecue Nation.

I'm JT.

My co-host and co-pilot, Leanne, is off working for PepsiCo this week.

I believe her and our sister do these food styling gigs for big commercial television

shoots and stuff.

And so that's what she's doing.

She ran away from home.

But I don't blame her for that.

We'd like to thank the folks at Panadill's natural beef the way nature intended.

You can go to Panadill's beef.com.

Check out their story.

It's great beef.

You can even order some online there if they're not in your part of the country.

Well, we've got a friend of the show is back today.

Stan Hayes, the CEO and co-founder of Operation Barbecue Relief.

I always enjoy talking to Stan because they do such great work.

Truly, truly.

We don't have that many disasters if you will up here in the Northwest.

You know, hurricanes, floods, that type of thing, a little flood once in a while.

But in the Midwest, the south and another parts of the world stand in his crew are there.

Hey, welcome back, bud.

Thank you so much for having me back on.

I appreciate it.

Now, you know, I'm honored to, you know, continue to be invited back.

It's not a problem.

You and I both like to talk.

So it's easy to fill up the hour.

OBR has been really busy.

I follow you online, of course.

And I talked to you a couple times a year and that.

But what have you guys been doing lately?

I mean, last time you were on, we talked about the camp.

And I know you've made a lot of progress on that.

You've got a benefit golf tournament coming up with some stuff.

You're looking for a director of,

I don't want to say the title wrong Stan.

You can say it.

It's really a director of disaster.

We call it director of disaster because they do more than just culinary.

But it's a very, you know,

director of disaster culinary is how it started.

But that position gets into more operational pieces than just the food service side.

So, you know, it's a very culinary, heavy position.

We're looking for somebody that, you know,

obviously understands the volume.

And but has some experience, not necessarily

does that all disaster experience.

But understands also,

menu planning and scalability.

Right.

Right. That's a, that's a huge deal.

I'll, I'll tell you a quick story.

Years ago, I worked for an overseas firm that bought,

they bought a ranch.

And they did this big essay contest in their country and in this country.

And they brought in like, I don't know,

it's about a hundred kids.

And okay, and I was the resident Wrangler

or a couple of weeks there for them because that was a horse guy, right?

The amount of food that they brought in,

uh, they brought in two semis full of food, Stan.

And it was incredible.

And then they got rained out so they left it all.

And we donated most of it to charity and stuff.

But that really struck a chord with me of

planning and not knowing.

Uh, they could have had 300 kids there.

And they wouldn't have eaten all this food in 10 days.

You know what I mean?

So, I think that's an integral part of it.

You know, it, it, it is, and you know, we used to,

we used to start out with rolling, you know, a couple of semis.

But, you know, in our planning process,

we're about 10 semis deep when we start looking,

especially on a major disaster,

a big hurricane coming in or, um,

you know, a big tornado that just happens.

You know, you mentioned, you know, up in your area.

I mean, really your area is wildfires and,

and a case with mud.

And wildfires and floods are very much the same.

And in many ways, people, people sort of, you know,

go in all different directions.

They don't normally go to one concerted little area

like they might after a tornado hits or, or, you know,

are evacuated from a hurricane.

Um, and the flooding and, and fires can turn like that

to where an area that is evacuated, you know,

today by 10 o'clock tonight,

they may be letting everybody back in, right?

Right, right.

You know, which very, very rarely ever happens,

you know, after a tornado or a hurricane

where they let people back in that quickly,

unless it just didn't hit that area.

Right.

Yeah, that's, that's one of the,

the kind of the strange things, you know,

last few years, we've had some pretty good-sized fires

up here in both Oregon and Washington.

And they would have these zones, the red zone.

And you were, you know, it was a green zone,

which was fine, yellow, caution, red.

Don't go in there.

And then there was a,

there was another one, which is like,

you're not going home type deal.

But that, like you said, that would change

sometimes within just a couple hours.

Yeah.

And people could go back and if they left livestock

or whatever, check it out,

get their, get their goods out, be safe.

But yeah, when you see,

we see it, of course, on television and stuff.

When we see flooding, the aftermath of hurricanes,

that time, some poor reporter standing on the beach

with his leg chained to a concrete block

so he doesn't get blown away,

trying to do his life remote there.

I always feel sorry for those guys.

They don't come back right away.

But you got to eat, you got to eat.

You know, you got to eat, you know,

I mean, let's face it, there's a few things

that you have to have.

Shelters, you know, a big one and food is the other big one.

Right.

And then there's the resources and, you know,

such as emergency resources or things like that.

You know, we're just, we're really only qualified in one area

and that is the food side.

We can't help much about the housing.

We can't, you know, we're not an EMS type group

or anything like that that they can help

or even provisioning outside of the food side.

I mean, finding diapers, finding, you know,

things like that, clothes that people need.

You know, we partner with some people around that time,

you know, that do those things.

But, you know, that's not what we're really good at.

You know, what we're good at is being able

to provide a good, hot, comforting meal.

How do you plan, make up an event?

There's a hurricane coming to the west side of Florida.

And, you know, you've got the guys at NOAA

and the weather services and they're saying

it's a cat three or cat five or whatever.

But how do you, when you first roll the semis,

how do you kind of know what you're going to need

right out the gate?

I mean, you're obviously going to be there for a while

so you can restock at some point.

But how do you know what you're going to hit the ground with?

Yeah, so, you know, we start with, you know,

looking at the size of the area going to be impacted.

You know, obviously, you know, cat three to cat five

doesn't really matter at that point

when you're at a cat three or above.

You know, there's going to be widespread damage.

So, really, what we're going to do is we're going to,

we're going to be rolling in our first trucks

that are going to have our main staples, right?

We have a quick culinary to hit the ground,

running within the first 24 hours

to where we can start putting meals out.

Once we get on the ground, you usually quick fire stuff.

Sausage sandwiches, things like that,

are more heat and serve type of an approach than, you know,

but we're, like I said, we'll start out with,

with a series of about 10 semi trucks

that we know are going to come in.

And we even, our own equipment,

like our commands center, I always wanted our command center

to roll in first, right?

And I wanted it to be front and center so everybody saw it.

But it is now one of the latter vehicles that comes in

because I need the food there on site.

I need the smokers on site.

I need the equipment and supplies.

So those things start rolling in,

generally within, you know, within 24 hours.

We warehouse a lot of our own stuff.

We have multiple warehouses around the country.

We also work with Amazon who allows us to,

to at least, you know, store some vehicle

and vehicle or vehicles and trailers.

Their main disaster hub is in Atlanta.

So that's a great place for us,

especially when you're looking along the Gulf Coast

or up the East Coast side during hurricane season.

So, you know, we're able to also move equipment

around the different parts of the year.

We know right now in tornado season

that we're going to sit here and make sure that we have stuff,

you know, around the Midwest and across the Ohio Valley area

down towards Texas, Oklahoma,

just to make sure that we have coverage.

But like our main food storage right now,

freezer storage is Kansas City and Dallas.

So between the two areas, Kansas City is really a smaller hub.

We only have a certain amount of space,

but it's donated space and freeze better than paying

whenever possible.

Sure.

And then we're actually looking at moving

all the stuff from Dallas to another warehouse space

that we have on the Tennessee Virginia border

around the Tri-Cities area,

because one, we already have equipment in that area.

We already have a warehouse space

and the owner of the warehouse is going to build us.

He's in the business of, you know, cooler storage

and things like that.

Sure.

So he's actually working on building that out for us

because we've ran into problems.

We're a small client

and we're a client that doesn't generate a lot of revenue for them.

Right.

Meaning that most of those warehouses get paid on the churn.

You know, they get paid on the square footage,

but the churn is what really,

that in and out is where they really make their money.

So they don't like us when it sits there for eight months

and doesn't it?

Right.

So we're, you know, it can take us,

it can take us three to five days

to get our stuff out of one of those big box warehouses

because we're a small customer and everything.

So we've got to start out

with the first couple of semis already in place.

And so we're just working our way to the point

that, you know, you know,

at any given time in warehouse space,

I have probably around 350 to 400,000 servings

of meat and about the same amount on maybe a little less

on, you know, like number 10 cans of vegetables

and stuff like that.

Sure.

I can roll in with a couple of semis on my own

and start the process and then back though

like you're talking about.

Right.

Right.

That's, that's, well, it's, it's such a huge job.

And, um, you know, to know that

being a guy that ran the catering company for a number of years,

you know, on that very small, small scale,

it's, it's kind of mind boggling to, uh,

to think about what your guys are doing.

Uh, we got to take a break,

but we're going to be back with Stanton Hayes

who has to be the CEO

and one of the founding members of Operation Barbecue Relief

and Stan and I will be back in just a couple of minutes.

Please stay with us.

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This is an encore.

Welcome back to the nation.

That's Barbecue Nation.

I'm JT Leanne is off on special assignment this week.

If you'd like to check out our websites and stuff real quick,

you can just go to BarbecueNationJT.com.

You can find this, uh,

all kinds of social media platforms

between, you know, Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn

and all that stuff.

Leanne and I personally have them.

The show has it.

Kind of hard to miss us.

Anyway, we're talking with Stan Hayes

from Operation Barbecue Relief.

Stan's been on the show several times before.

I always enjoyed talking with him because this stuff

fascinates me from the logistic side and the, and the cooking side.

But also what I think is you guys really step up with helping people in need.

Um, you know, I'll tell you this folks.

If you've not been under any, and I'm sure a lot of you have,

but if you've never been under dress, real serious dress

and you haven't eaten for 36 hours,

and you're trying to find a place to get a bottle of water

because you're starting to dehydrate.

Stan and his crew are the people you want to talk to.

That's, that's what I can say because those situations are not pleasant.

When you, um, when you roll in,

and you were talking in the first statement, Stan,

you have the, you know, kind of the heat and eat type stuff like that.

Do the meals get kind of graduated as time goes on?

If you think you're going to be in a, in a situation for 10 days,

do they get a little more, uh, more fresh vegetables instead of canned vegetables?

That type of thing.

If you can get your hands on them.

Yeah, the fresh vegetables are our, our challenge in itself,

cooking time wise and, and finding them in the mount, uh, that, that we need.

You know, right.

If you're doing 25,000 meals or 30 or 40,000 meals in a day, um,

cooking from fresh, we, we already got towers of, you know,

of pallets of number 10 cans.

If we started bringing them fresh vegetables, it would, it would take forever.

Now, we do some of the fresh stuff that we do try to add an augment with,

with the meals as we go.

We try to bring as, you know, fruit, um, when we can get it,

we try to add in, um, you know, even if we have to do fruit cups, right?

Things that, things that they can take with them, handheld type things, snacks, um, you know,

everything from granola bars, uh, something that, you know,

at lunchtime that they can have, you know, a few hours down the road before they have, you know,

and especially if they don't get back out and get dinner.

Right.

So we, we, we, we continue to work on that.

And, you know, our, our big, our big focus last, you know,

you know, year, two years has been around that, adding that, that fruit component to it, um,

just a little bit more, um, the fruit cups are great because you literally can sit there and,

and, and hold it for later as a snack.

Right.

You know, and we're even getting into and looking at what we can do, you know,

we don't do breakfast today, but we're, we're looking at putting together, uh,

with the help of some of our, our, our partners out there, um, breakfast boxes that would be,

you know, more, you know, shelf-stable items that you,

sure, you got there.

And again, it's not a, it's not that comfort meal piece.

Right, right, right.

But at the same time, it, it's still, it still gives them something, you know, um,

you know, whether it's a box of cereal, you know, today, the, the milk today, the,

the shelf-stable milk today that they have isn't like the old days where you mix the powder up in

the water, when you're camping, is it good and everything else?

It's actually pretty good.

And, you know, that way you're able to give them, you know, a, a little bit of normalcy,

you know, a, a bowl of cereal in the morning and, you know, and a fruit bar or something like that is,

is what a lot of families and people are used to.

They're not, you, you know, not everybody's used to having, you know,

bacon and eggs for breakfast or something.

Right, right, right.

Yeah, we used to call that blue milk.

You're graduating into, you know, to, yeah.

Sam, when I was a kid, we called that blue milk.

That's that old carnation stuff that they mixed up.

It was god-awful.

But when I was a kid and we were out there, um, uh, we, we, uh,

you know, we'd be out camping and stuff like that.

You know, they wouldn't bring cartons of milk.

They would just, they'd bring a, an empty carton and they would mix that up.

Yeah, it was pretty.

And then you're trying to get you to drink it.

Yeah, like, yeah, that much rather drink the cold water out of that taps.

And yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, uh, how is the camp doing?

The camp has come along great.

Um, it is progressed to the point that, um, this week, uh, the first building,

the bathhouse, um, construction is that they're, they are, um,

sealing the concrete floors, um, yesterday and today.

Um, they, it will give it a, you know, give it a 48 hour cure time, um, after that.

And we're now just waiting for, um, the propane to be hooked up for the hot water.

Um, and we're, we're ready to start rolling, essentially.

Um, with the bathhouse.

So the tiny cabins that we already have that are down in the woods that we use,

now people don't have to roll over and come to the lodge to take a shower or use the restroom

or anything like that, um, they'll be able to walk to the top of the hill.

You know, about half the distance, um, which, uh, the distance isn't great.

But, I mean, just it's a little bit more convenient.

Sure.

To roll in there.

So it, it's, uh, you know, I think the, the last thing after that,

and they start putting the siding on, then we'll finish the ramp.

Um, we'll get finished, um, for the ADA accessibility.

Right.

Um, for it.

But, you know, it is, it's exciting, you know, we, the first cabin itself is about ready to punch

and go through the punch list of, hey, you know, we need to touch up here.

This, uh, this isn't right or this is moved or whatever it might be.

And then we're going to be able to empty out.

We already have the mattresses.

We've had them for over a year.

They were donated by the temper seal, seal, uh, um, foundation,

temperpidic sealing, uh, you know, basically gave us a truckload of, of, of what we need.

I think we're, we're like, maybe two mattresses short when it, when it's said and done.

Um, but we'll be able to move those out of our shop, which takes up about 40% of the shop space.

Yeah.

Um, and other right now has been all the wood,

keeping the wood in a controlled environment, you know, to go in there and we're,

you know, we're using a lot of rough cut, um, pine and staining it at a nice golden rich,

you know, um, sort of honey color, if you will.

Sure.

So, you know, we got a lot, you know, a lot's going on, but it's, it's moving.

It's progressing about, I'm down there every other week for construction meetings.

So I'll be down there next Tuesday and, and really have an opportunity to see the progress.

And it's amazing in two weeks, uh, you know, what we're seeing in that.

That's kind of the fun part too when you get to go back and see that progress made and you,

you know, you kind of puts a smile on your face, I'm sure.

Yeah.

Well, right now, if everything, you know, we don't have any major pickups, uh, the first week in June,

they should literally be handing over the proverbial keys and moving, moving their stuff out.

There you go.

That works.

Hey, we got to take another break.

We're going to be back with Stan Hayes from Operation Barbecue Relief here on the nation.

Don't go away.

This is great stuff.

We'll be right back.

Hey, everybody.

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This is an encore.

Welcome back to Barbecue Nation.

I'm JT.

Miss Whippen is out in the world this week on special assignment,

but we've got her captured again for next week.

We'd like to thank the folks at Painted Hills Natural Beef Beef, the way nature intended.

Go to their website at Painted Hills Beef.

Check out their website.

Their story.

They've got an online store there.

Great stuff to do that.

And also want to talk to you a little bit about pig powder.

That's Leanne's product invented by her father, trim tab.

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pilot term, you might say.

Anyway, it was voted at one time the best rub on the planet.

So go to pigpatter.com.

Leanne will make sure it gets to you.

She might even autograph a picture for you as I always give her a hard time about.

But regardless of that, we've got Stan Hayes here today from Operation Barbecue Relief.

When you started this

13 years ago or whatever it was, Stan, did you ever think it would get this big?

I mean, we all have, when we start things, we kind of think like, man,

I'd really, you know, someday, this, that we dreams.

But you've actually made it happen, you and your crew.

Yeah, so, you know, it's probably, that's one of the probably the top three questions

that I get asked is, did you ever think?

Yeah, I know exactly where the question's going when it starts.

And no, I never thought it would be this big.

I never thought, you know, I knew we were making and having an impact in communities.

I knew it would grow.

I don't know that anybody ever thought it would grow to the point it is today.

I don't think, you know, as you look at it, you know, our growth outside of the disaster

into first responders and, you know, what I'll just call those heroes that are always serving us.

I think that has been a natural progression to continue to do good.

Because when you look at the people that we're serving, you look at the volunteer group

that we have, you know, they're the ones that really told us, hey, outside of disasters,

we want to help our first responders or we want to help the veterans in our community or,

you know, active military. Sure.

Yeah, so we listen to what our volunteers have to say and as well as our partners out there,

you know, where do they look at, you know, continuing to help?

How many volunteers do you have now?

I'm sure it fluctuates depending on the situation, but yeah, so we have, so we have over 18,000

people who've registered with our email in a database, right? You know, over the last 13 years

of that, we have about 800 or so that have actually got through the full process to, you know,

have their background check done, you know, provide all the detailed information that we need

that's more than just their email address. Right.

And I call those our engaged volunteers, anybody that spends the time to go through there and

have their background check done and fill out all the different line items that we ask for, right?

They're truly the ones that we really rely on, so you have, you know, you have 800 that you,

what I'd call your core group and out of that core, you know, above that 800 of the 18,000 that we

have, the other ones I call those, you know, being in the right place or the wrong place at the

right time, whatever you want to call it, right? You know, they're ones that don't have the

flexibility to travel, they don't have the flexibility to take long periods off, but if we were in

their community on a Saturday, they may come out, right? They're interested, they want to get our

emails, they want to see what we're doing, they just may not today be able to be in that situation

and not everybody is, we understand that. But I mean, a good number of those 800s started out with

that, you know, and now have grown to, you know, hey, you know, people that we have, we've done

additional training and education on, so they're actually leading different areas during deployments.

Excellent. Let's talk about the food. We've touched on it a couple of times, but do you get like

the proteins, whether it's chicken or beef or pork or whatever? Do you have to buy those or do you

get, do you have some companies that will help you out and donate some or a disaster happens and

you've got 20,000 pounds of pork? Well, that, if you're going to serve 200,000 meals over the course

of a time, that's only going to take care of part of it. Do you ever get a phone call from a CEO

or a VP somewhere and says, Stan, send your truck over here. I've got another 40,000 pounds of

pork shoulder for you. Yeah, we do. So let me start at the beginning of that big question is,

sure. So, so one of our very first sponsors in the moot, the meat area was seaboard foods,

prairie fresh pork. And, you know, they have been with us now for probably seven, eight years,

at least. And every year they pledge to donate so much. And you're talking about pounds,

we're talking about how many truckloads. Yeah, yeah. And when we're going through that, and really

they come to us when they're long on things going, hey, do you have storage room because we've got

a bunch of product here that we had to freeze because the main companies like prairie fresh try to

keep it fresh. They try to get it from the factory to the stores, you know, without without doing

that. Once they freeze it, then that window that they have, you know, of, hey, how long are we

going to keep this? We don't have an infinite amount. So that's one of the companies. We have a

couple of other producers out there, Holstone, who's a who's a smaller has been has been a good

supporter of us. We've got stuff from Tyson before. We've got stuff from Smithfield. All of them have

you know been involved. When it comes to beef, national beef has been has been involved for the

last couple of years. And we just did a project with them. You know, last week. And so I I expect

that to continue to happen. It's, you know, beef is so much more expensive. So when you get a,

you know, you get a truckload of brisket donated to you, you know, that's a that's a big day for you

because if I have to pay for it, I'm going to go poultry or pork all day long because the cost

for pound is it's cost prohibitive for me to irresponsibly, you know, pay for beef when

poultry and and pork are are so much cheaper. And then, you know, Mount Air and

in the poultry world kind of, I'm forgetting some names. I mean, on the poultry said we, you know,

butter balls really the only one that we have a deal with. The other ones can brew because they're

more of a regionalized, you know, right, right producers out there. So as we go around the country,

we know who the different ones are to contact. And you know, believe it or not, where we get most of

our ice is from poultry companies. Yeah, we'll get, we'll get boxes and box wax boxes that,

you know, case boxes that normally wings or legs or whatever go in. They will fill those up because

they have their huge, the huge ice machines. And so we literally have had, you know, poultry trucks

roll. But without poultry, poultry is really hard for us to cook because to get the volume needed,

that's a lot of work. Right. Now we have, we have a new, it's not new technology, but we have, we have

we have a new cooker that is like a char broiler, you know, conveyor char broiler. Sure, sure,

that'll roll it through. And we've been testing that with boneless, skinless chicken thighs.

And, and we have to slow it down a little bit, unlike a burger because we will take burgers and run

it through there and do things like a, we'll do that with a brown gravy over rice and things like

yeah, we, we get far outside, I also outside of just the barbecue world anymore because no one

wants to eat a pulled pork sandwich every day. Right. You think that same pulled pork and you put it

over rice with a teriyaki sauce. Now you have something different. Right. Right. Right. But, you know,

so we've, we've progressed it, you know, rice has been one of the big things that we've added over

the years because we just know one is, it's inexpensive. You know, yes, it's expensive. It's heavy,

but, you know, compared to yield, it's pretty light what we can get out of it. And, and, you know,

we're at full tilt. We're, we're running, you know, 10 tilt skillets at a time, you know,

which is about 10,000 servings when you're doing, you know, just vegetables. Right. So,

we've, we've gotten, we've gotten to where we can do a lot more and, and utilize the equipment

in different ways. And so now poultry has started coming back in because we have these

cookers that we can run it. I mean, two people can run this conveyor belt system. One person,

you know, loading it and, and bringing this, you know, and getting the, the, the cases there

opened up and just loading it. And one person making sure that they don't overfill on other,

you know, so that's it. Very interesting, you know, process when it comes down to it.

Dear people on the ground that are actually doing the cooking, because you were talking about

this with the rice and and teriyaki sauce and stuff. And, and I think that's tremendous. But

do the people there, can they get a little creative? Let's say you had a hundred pounds of frozen

peas and you didn't know what you were going to do with them, because they put that in the rice

and put the teriyaki. Absolutely. Yeah. We do a lot of that. We do a lot of next vegetable rice and

stuff like that. You know, we got pretty creative, you know, when we went to Maui last year,

you know, we obviously weren't rolling semi-trucks in. We weren't rolling stuff like that. So we

partnered with restaurants over there, used our our knowledge of how to mass feed and and to help

the restaurants learn to scale to do things. And many of them kept doing it far after we left.

And that, but, you know, there, you know, we learned, you know, and worked to really

provide culturally appropriate meals, right? You know, we were a lot more of, we were using a lot of

pineapple juice with with pork and with, you know, to add sort of that tang that they're used to,

not just our barbecue sauce. We would add, we'd fix the barbecue sauce with that and and thin it

down. So you had that those flavors. We had, you know, I think we had rice on 90% of the meals that

went out, you know, because they're just that's what they're used to there. And, you know,

we learned a lot from that, you know, you know, in helping diversify our meal selection

to be able to do that. But we have our volunteers when, you know, it's usually on the latter end

of deployments will work on menu development. So we try to we try to continue to menu develop and

let them give us some recipes that we may we may have to sit there and scale, right? You know,

right? Not too many, not too many recipe books are, are, are written for a 40 gallon tilt skill.

Absolutely. We're going to take another break. We're going to come back, come back and wrap up the

regular part of the show. And I'm going to ask Stan a very pressing question. I think you'll like it.

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This is an encore welcome back to the nation that's barbecue nation. We would like to thank

folks at the Oregon crab commission. I just did another crab deal. My version of a crab slider

last week on TV here in the Northwest and Dungeon is crab. You know, they go from sea to plate,

as they say. If you get a chance to eat some Dungeon is crab out there, folks, do it. We're

talking with Stan Hayes here, CEO of Operation barbecue relief. Millions of meals served. I don't

mean is 11 million the current number or. Yeah, it's 11 plus. I don't even know what the current

number is. It's over 11 million. I know it's over 36 different states, plus the Bahamas now,

and we're somewhere approaching 120 or so deployments. There you go. So my pressing question is,

when you were in Hawaii, did you use spam? You know, we did not. We looked at it, but you know,

you know, one, you couldn't get that much. You'd go around the island now. Now, now I've also never

seen the variety. Like I was at Walmart, you know, picking up some supplies one morning before I

headed to the site. And I've never seen so many different varieties of spam in my life. Yeah.

And at the McDonald's there, they do have a spam breakfast sandwich. Yeah. But I wasn't brave

enough. I just, I just couldn't do it. Well, I'll tell you, I always like spam. My dad

adverse to spam. Yeah. My dad having been in the military a long time ago. That was a no,

that was a no sale for him. You know, he wasn't going to do that. But my daughter in college,

she had a bunch of kids that went to school with her from Hawaii. And I, and you know, she came

home one day and she goes, do we have any spam? Now this is a kid that, you know, grew up eating kind

of meat and potato stuff. But I never thought she would do that. I say, yeah, we have like three

cans in the cupboard. And she, she took it, started making meals with it. I was proud of her. Anyway,

that was a really pressing question on my, on my brain. Absolutely. You get

it. Supports from the individual states or the federal government at all or anything like that

stand. Yeah. So usually it's, it's through the state. If we get any and then the state goes back

the way it works is like with FEMA and everybody. If, let's say you hear like, hey, the,

the president's declared a disaster, you know, for XYZ state. And they'll generally say,

you know, something like it's at a 75% reimbursement. Let's say, that means that that FEMA's going to,

you know, go through the process with the state, the state's going to have to claim all of, you

know, what's been done. And all the money spent to be able to get 75% of that money bet. Well, what

as a nonprofit, what we can do is all of our volunteer hours can be monetized. There's a whole

organization out there that tells you what the chart is and how much it a volunteer hours worth

and all of these things. So we keep, we keep meticulous records of, you know, down to the

volunteer themselves, how many hours they spend on site. Right. When they checked in, when they

checked out, all of those things can be provided as support. So we can go to a state and say, hey,

our volunteer hours may equal, you know, 60, 70,000 hours during that time at $30 an hour.

This is how much this could mean to you. So what we want you to do is we want you to help us with,

you know, the cost of these meals because in turn, you're going to be able to use not just the

cost of the meals of feeding people in your state, but our volunteer hours to go back. And now,

that's how they could be made whole because all those volunteer hours could help them well over

that 75% right to hit that 100%. That's interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah. So and a lot of the

smaller states don't know it. A lot of the small emergency management folks have never really

dealt in that world. So they don't know. So we try to educate them on how we can help them.

But the big states like Florida, you know, some in Texas, some up in the Northeast. I mean,

the Carolinas and stuff. We've been well known in those areas. They know who we are. We have

members of our team go on to, you know, these emergency management conferences across the country.

So we have connections. You know, some states are easy to work with than others.

Right. But, you know, we're also not going to, you know, we're not going to wait for a state to come

and say, hey, we want you here. Even though Florida generally says it before we ever mobilize,

they're like, hey, we want you to be on our, you know, feeding team or, you know, Louisiana

or something like that. So dealing directly with FEMA and the federal government is just a very,

very difficult thing to do. So we much prefer to work with the state or somebody else and

I understand that. That'd be the middleman. Yeah. When would a state like Florida call you

and say, hey, Stan, we've got, we've got Hurricane Izzy coming in and would, would you be ready?

Would you go have your, you know, you kind of know the flight path or the travel path? Would

you guys be staged at the Georgia border for us and whatever the, I don't know exactly how you do it.

But they get there and you got your first 10 trucks lined up ready to go as soon as they give you

the shoot up the flare. Yeah. So that's, that's, you know, that is very much how it works on,

you know, with, with hurricanes because they have enough lead time that they, you know,

they can, they can come to us. They also know what our capacity is. They know that if I have every

piece of equipment on the ground, you know, I'm at 60 to 65,000 meals a day capacity. Generally,

they also know what keeps me from getting there because that's generally what I, you know,

what I harp on when they're like, how, how fast can you be to 60? How fast can you get me bunkhouses

for people to stay in? Yeah. Yeah. Because what keeps me from, from getting to 60,000 is supply chain,

which generally I, I control a lot of my supply chain. But it's the volunteer side. If I don't have

places for volunteers to sleep and stay, I can't bring them in to scale up to that as fast as they

would like me to sometimes. Right. And it's my leverage with the state to be able to get some of

those things. You want me at 60,000? Well, that means I got to have, you know, 200 people to 250 people

stay on site. And you're going to have to help me get another 100 of day workers that are coming

from the area. Real quick, Stan, website throughout some information. So people can check it out. Yeah,

so the website is OBR.org. And you know, you can go to that site and register to volunteer. We're

actually going to be up in the Pacific Northwest again in June, up at Alana for barbecue fest. And we'll

need some volunteer help up there. So be looking for volunteer opportunities. But you can also go to

the website and click that donate button and help out. Follow us on social medias. OP BBQ Relief is the

handle on all the different social media. Watch my updates on the camp and watch for when, you know,

wishless Wednesdays. Right now our big push is helping us finish out what we need to purchase

to finish out the rooms and everything. Once we get that camp built.

Excellent. Maybe this year I can help you at Alana. I don't know, I don't know the dates yet,

but I'll see. Anyway, it's Father's Day weekend, the 14th, 15th, 16th June.

Well, I'm probably not doing anything. That would be so.

Daughters gone. Wife's probably in Europe or something. Anyway,

Stan Hay, CEO and co-founder of Operation BBQ Relief and front of the show. Stan, thanks.

Stick around for after hours. Folks, we're going to be back next week with another edition of

Barbecue Nation. I'm JT and Miss Leanne is, we'll be back next week. I think, remember our

motto here. Turn it. Don't burn it. Take care, everybody.