need some help planning ribs for a festival

[mikeandwife91]

I've been watching this forum for over a year now, and thanks to you guys and the willingness to share your knowledge, I have the reputation of some of the best BBQ in the area. Now the fun part. Our church is the only church invited to help out in a community 4th of July festival, and I have been nominated to cook ribs. They are guestimating between 12,000 and 15,000 people if the weather cooperates. Cooking for 50 is no biggy, but this is a bit overwhelming. How do you guess at the number of people eating ribs? How much rub and sauce to buy? I live in Akron Ohio and to the best of my knowledge, there is nobody nearby that is into large scale BBQ that can help me out. I go to an awsome church, and if we can pull this off, it would be the biggest community outreach we've ever done.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jeff T]

In my humble opinion that would take a pretty big cooker to pull that one off.
Are you and your cooker the only ones cooking those ribs?
What and order. 12,000 - 15,000 people ..... wow! I`ve done bbq for 100 -150 before but not that many.
I`m sure those that know will chime in soon.
Good luck on that one.

[SoEzzy]

Welcome to the forum mikeandwife91!

I don't know either, but here are some of my thoughts!

1) Check to see if someone is taking on the responsibility of liaising with the health dept, if it is going to be you, line your ducks up first!
2) Is this going to organized through your church, and does it have a health dept recognized kitchen available?
3) If it does then you might want to make sure that the info on the food situation goes out with all the advertising. Make sure the wording says first come first served, or food served from xx time till it runs out.
4) If you can pre-sell the food, you will be able to grab a clue as to the numbers required to fulfill the day. But you are not likely to only sell to the pre-sale ticket holders.
5) Pre-selling the tickets for the food also allows you to gather the money you will need to buy the ribs, look to the local slaughter house or bigger meat places, for a really good deal on that sort of quantity ahead of time, don’t forget, you will need to get this order in sooner rather than later.
6) If you can also find out how many other places are going to be serving food, you can then get better estimates on your possible numbers, divide the lowest quoted number by the (number of vendors ± 30%) e.g. 12,000 / (10 vendors + 3) = 923 meals. 923 meals @ 3 ribs / meal is 230 racks of ribs. 923 meals @ 2 ribs / meal is 154 racks of ribs.
7) There will be a need to pre-cook, hold in a HD approved manner, and re-heat in a HD approved manner all those ribs, unless you are going to rent 4 or 5 large smokers and work like a Trojan all night and day!
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