Bill Miller Bar-B-Q expands with new Texas headquarters

SAN ANTONIO — It’s a San Antonio staple built on barbecue, family and faith in hard work.

For more than 70 years, Bill Miller Bar-B-Q has served homemade brisket, pies and sweet tea with hometown pride. Now the company is entering a new era — one that could double its reach across Texas.

After more than five decades downtown, the company closed its flagship location on September 12 after over 50 years of service. The closure marks the relocation of Bill Miller’s headquarters and commissary to a sprawling new campus on the far west side, near Highway 90 and Loop 151.

The 335,000-square-foot facility — roughly seven acres under one roof — brings together every part of the business for the first time. What used to be spread out — employee parking, the dry-goods warehouse, production plant, bakery, meat pit, salad-dressing lines and corporate offices — is now all connected.

“This is the single biggest project in the history of the company that we’ve ever taken on,” said Jim Guy Egbert, CEO of Bill Miller Bar-B-Q. “None of those buildings downtown were designed for what they functioned as when we used them. They were an old tire facility for Goodyear and an old leather plant. We adapted the space for our needs versus the needs being designed for our uses.”

The company worked with the Dennis Group, an engineering firm specializing in plant design, to make the new space efficient and employee-friendly. “The goal is not just to have this great, beautiful building,” Egbert said, “but to have people inside of it producing more consistently than we ever have.”

The new headquarters is home to more than 400 employees across three shifts, with the company employing 4,630 people overall. Each department now has room to grow — and room to breathe.

“He came to me and said, ‘Jim Guy, we’re out of space. We’ve gotta grow. Our employees are shoulder-to-shoulder, our trucks are touching each other,’” Egbert recalled of Balous Miller, former board chairman and CEO.

Egbert said the facility allows the company to double its restaurant count — potentially opening two to four new stores per year. “We ought to have 30 or 40 stores in Austin, Waco, Temple, Killeen — the whole I-35 corridor,” he said. “We go anywhere there’s growth.”

Bill Miller Bar-B-Q currently operates 76 restaurants across Texas, along with six Laguna Madre Seafood Co. locations.

On Sunday, about 400 managers and their families toured the new site — their first look at how the food is made before it reaches stores.

Plant Manager Dale Sims started as a bus boy at Store #4 off Jackson Keller and West Avenue nearly 50 years ago. He later became a manager, an area manager and now oversees production. “The old building served its purpose, but we were out of space,” Sims said. “They took the zip codes of all my employees, found out where the majority of them lived — and that’s how they chose this location. I didn’t lose one employee moving over here.”

Sims said employees were part of the design process from day one. “The set of drawings they came up with, I took to the employees in each room and let them make changes,” he said. “It’s not all about what’s best for the dollar. It’s about what’s best for the company and the employees — they’re what make the company.”

Every day starting around 3 a.m., trucks begin loading and rolling out by 4 or 5 a.m., delivering fresh food to restaurants across Texas.

Inside, you can see workers pouring pies, packaging bread and rolling 85,000 to 95,000 tortillas a day. “They’re tortilla balls,” Egbert said. “We make the product here and send it out to the stores, where they’re cooked fresh every day. I think we’ve got the best tortillas in the business.”

The bakery now has 14 rotating ovens, while the pit room houses 12 brick pits, the same number once used downtown — but with space to double that. Each pit can smoke about 2,500 pounds of meat at a time, with briskets sitting out for 24 hours before cooking over Hill Country live oak.

“This is where all of our salad dressings are made,” Egbert added. “All of our hot sauces, our pico de gallo — it’s all done here.”

Lupe San Miguel, commissary manager, has been with the company 41 years — starting as a driver and dishwasher before working his way up. “Making sure all the food gets to all the Bill Millers and Lagunas — that’s my job,” he said. “We didn’t change anything moving from the old plant to the new one. Everything stays the same. Fresh is best.”

He called the transition “like selling your house in 1950 and moving into a condominium.”

“We’ve got more space. It’s better — a new facility,” San Miguel said. “We can expand more, make more Bill Millers. We can hit maybe 125 or 150 stores.”

San Miguel is already looking ahead to the holidays, when his team will cook 18,000 turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas. “All the food Bill Miller sells — it’s under my watch,” he said proudly.

First Shift Manager Jason Rasmussen has been with Bill Miller for 32 years, beginning as a linesman at Store #47 near Loop 1604 and Highway 281. “I loved it. I stopped going to college because of it,” he said with a laugh.

Rasmussen now helps coordinate production and distribution between the commissary and stores. “I got to see what the stores struggled with or needed help with,” he said. “Now I know what we need to do to get product to them faster so they can take care of the customer.”

He says the new location gives Bill Miller the chance to expand farther than ever before. “We’ve steadily increased our store count over the years, but with this facility, we have the opportunity to grow and serve our food all over the place,” he said. 

“Kerrville, Bryan, College Station, Uvalde, San Angelo — we can serve them right out of San Antonio,” said Egbert.

The new headquarters isn’t just about business growth. The company plans to make the facility as welcoming as possible — adding longhorns outside and eventually opening it up for school field trips.

“Since we’ve been here, people want to be part of this,” Egbert said. “This is not the ending. This is the beginning — to grow new stores, have more people and serve more communities.”

Bill Miller started his business in the early 1970s downtown, building on a legacy that began in 1950 with a $500 loan and a scooter selling eggs door-to-door.

“The idea was small when Bill and Ila Faye Miller had it 75 years ago: open a restaurant,” Egbert said. “They didn’t have this vision. But as the company grew and more family members came on board, the vision grew with it — and the dream got bigger.”

As for what’s next for the longtime downtown facility? Egbert said plans are still in the works.

In the meantime, the company’s focus remains the same: making every meal from scratch, sending it out fresh daily, and staying true to its San Antonio roots.

“We just want to show the world we’re here,” Rasmussen said. “We’re not going anywhere.”