How All Things Barbecue uses recipes as gear marketing

All Things Barbecue sells the grills, smokers and outdoor kitchens people cook on, and the rubs and sauces that go on the food.

It has also built a recipe library of 1,246 recipes, 891 of them with video. Between July and September 2026 those pages drew more than 127,000 views.

How does All Things Barbecue use Recipe Kit? The recipes do two commercial jobs. They show a shopper what a pellet grill or smoker can do, and they turn the rubs and sauces used in each cook into shoppable, add-to-cart-ready products.

The challenge

All Things Barbecue did not start online. It opened as a small storefront in Wichita, out of a family barbecue tradition, and grew into a full outdoor-cooking retailer. The most distinctive part of it is The Sauce, the brand's own cooking channel, where a staff chef teaches technique recipe by recipe.

Selling smokers rather than sauce changes the customer's problem. After checkout, the owner has to work out how to use the thing now sitting on the patio, starting with how a pellet grill even works. We asked Chris Harmon at All Things Barbecue whether the library is really a manual for new owners or a channel of its own.

Definitely its own channel. It works to bring new people to the site. Recipes are a tough place to get traction. Where with a grill we may have 25 to 50 sites competing for that click, with a recipe we could have thousands of competitors. We have to make ourselves stand out.

The recipes also work a second surface.

Part of that is to show how to use the ingredients we sell. That helps reaffirm what the customer is looking at. We count on our recipe videos to carry that load on the product page.

That is why 891 of the 1,246 recipes carry video, most of them also published on the brand's YouTube channel. By his account the written page goes out and competes for the search, and the video does the reassuring back on the product page.

Why the payoff lands on the second cook

He is candid about how long the return takes.

Recipes don't convert immediately, they are long game. Heresy I know.

He means it about timing, and the reasoning comes from picturing who is actually on the page.

When someone has a full packer brisket on their kitchen counter and is reading your recipe, they are not buying a BBQ rub and waiting for it to arrive.

That reader "is cooking right then with what is in reach," he says, and the job of the page is "to help them right then and there and let them know you can help them make it better next time." They cannot buy a rub that has to ship, and they are also the reader most brands end up measuring.

The buyer is the same person a week later, planning the next cook. The first cook is the acquisition, the brand helping someone finish dinner with what is in reach. The second cook is the sale: they plan ahead, come back to the page, and the rub, say a Lone Star Brisket Rub, goes into the cart before the brisket hits the counter. Between July and September 2026, readers clicked add to cart 778 times on the recipe pages.

None of that depends on the reader remembering the brand. Every ingredient stays linked and priced on the page, so the path from a dish to a cart is already built when they come back.

The pellet-grill chicken breast recipe. The rubs it calls for are linked, priced and add-to-cart ready, with an Add All To Cart for the set (live, August 2026)

Name the cooking surface, not the SKU

Titles across the library tend to name a method or a cooking surface rather than a specific model. We asked whether that was a rule.

I wouldn't call it a deliberate rule. We used to call out the specific grill model, but that became an issue when a grill was discontinued. Touching on a grill category especially helps if someone is considering one. We can show them what they can do with it and help them picture how it fits in their lives.

We have a flagship grill that we use a lot, but we want someone to know they could make that same recipe on their own grill, or even in the kitchen.

It shows across the library. Pulled pork shoulder, skillet pizza on the pellet grill , steak on a pellet grill, smoked turkey for grill and smoker and a Thanksgiving turkey on the smoker are all titled for a method or a surface. A recipe named for a pellet grill survives the unit being retired, reaches the shopper still researching the category, and stays readable for someone who owns a competitor's grill or no grill at all.

The library is never finished

Older recipes get revisited, and the catalogue underneath them keeps moving.

Meaningful content is the target. We are constantly improving existing recipes. We are not afraid to experiment. One of the issues we run into is that products can get discontinued. When that happens we have to scramble to find a replacement and change everywhere it is used. Which of course means a video is out of date, but we make sure to call out the substitution where we can.

What they are adding now is aimed at two readers, and one of them is not human.

We add a what you'll love section to a recipe that is a quick highlight. We are adding FAQs to recipes. Part of the FAQ is a 1 to 5 rank for suitability to cook it indoors, especially handy for Thanksgiving meal prep. These new parts are not only for the customer but for AI consumption. Like it or not, AI will eventually be the dominant force in search.

It is already live. On the pellet-grill chicken breast page, the FAQ asks Can I make this indoors? and answers 2 out of 5. Can be done inside, loses key flavor, then explains that a cast iron pan over high heat gets the sear but not the pellet smoke. A barbecue audience cooks indoors in November, which is when the turkey kit sells. ATBBQ is deliberately writing those answers to work for both human readers and machine retrieval.

Say what the recipe is

They also went after a habit most food publishers share.

When you have five pulled pork recipes that are all the best ever, it comes across as empty.

The full version:

Definite statements like best brisket, or the only chicken recipe you need, are unnecessary. You can say our favorite, easy, or quick all you want. You need to say what it is clearly right from the start. Save the hyperbole for the description.

Their Rub Basics explainer is titled exactly that, and so is How to Make an All Purpose Barbecue Rub. At 1,246 recipes a library starts competing with itself, and every best-ever cancels out the one next to it.

The video and the page are not the same job

Most ATBBQ recipes exist twice, once as a page and once as a video, and the two get written to different rules.

Absolutely. On video we need to lean towards click-bait more to keep the YouTube machine happy. Where on the recipe page is more informational with different schema. But these strategies change. Never be afraid to experiment. Don't be afraid to be wrong, that can tell you more than being right.

The nine-year-old recipe experiment

Last year the team picked a recipe nobody was reading. It was nine years old, had no video, and had not earned a single click or impression in six months, so there was nothing to lose. They rewrote it, made the method clearer and changed the title.

That recipe now gets about 100,000 impressions and 500 clicks a month in organic search.

It was also, he says, "a lot less work than making a new recipe." In a library of 1,246 recipes, the pages nobody reads are the cheapest place to test a new title or a clearer method.

How Recipe Kit supports the system

The shoppable recipe cards carry the gear as well as the food. The steak on a pellet grill recipe links the Road House rub, a Finex cast iron skillet, a cast iron griddle and the YS640s pellet grill it was cooked on. A cook can add the rub a recipe calls for without leaving the page. The structured recipe schema underneath makes those pages eligible for rich results and readable to answer engines.

Between July and September 2026, Recipe Kit recorded more than 127,000 recipe page views on the store, across 1,246 recipes.

Lessons for gear and cookware brands

• Titles outlive products. ATBBQ stopped naming specific grills after discontinuations forced rewrites across the library. A category title survives the product cycle and still reaches shoppers who own something else.
• Your dead pages are the cheapest test you have. A recipe with no impressions carries no downside risk, whether that is an old pulled pork sandwich or a brisket chili. Rewriting and retitling one took ATBBQ from zero to roughly 100,000 impressions a month.
• Measure the second cook. The reader with meat already on the counter will not wait for delivery. Be useful now, and be the place they plan from next time.
• Split the work across both surfaces. ATBBQ leans on the written recipe to compete in search and on the video to reassure the shopper already on the product page.
• A deep library needs maintaining, not just feeding. Discontinued products break older recipes, and calling out the substitution keeps the page trustworthy. The same goes for explainers like the wood pellet FAQ.