The Bill Miller Bar-B-Q $55 million facility under construction on the far West Side will be completed within a year.
The first phase of the project is already done, said Jim Guy Egbert, president and CEO of the fast food company known best in the region for its low-cost fried chicken, brisket po-boys and buckets of sweet iced tea.
A second phase is expected to take another 10 months, bringing under one roof the Bill Miller kitchens, commissaries and offices now located downtown.
How soon the 14 new fire pits and smokers that will more than double its capacity to produce food for nearly 80 restaurants are ready is anybody’s guess, Egbert said.
Seasoning the pits must be done first and that takes time.
“Obviously that’s a critical component for us to make sure that we don’t lose the taste profile that in all of our meats,” Egbert said. “So we’ll take as long as it takes to duplicate exactly that what our customers have been used to the last five, six decades.”
Bill Miller started the business in 1950 with a $500 loan from his father he used to buy a motor scooter and sell eggs door to door. He later opened Highland Poultry House, a small poultry and egg business, before starting up Bill Miller Bar-B-Q as a fried chicken, burgers and barbecue restaurant next door. A second restaurant was opened in 1965.
Today, Bill Miller Bar-B-Q operates restaurants in San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Austin, with dining room and to-go service, and employs 4,700 people.
Bill and Ila Faye Miller’s descendents own the chain of restaurants which includes six Laguna Madre Seafood Co. restaurants, the restaurant real estate and buildings as well as its headquarters facility.
Bill Miller’s current headquarters and production facilities have been located downtown near the intersection of Santa Rosa Street and César E. Chávez Boulevard since 1971. But it has outgrown that space, Egbert said.
The company plans to hold onto the site as a production facility.
“We still have plans to operate downtown in our current facility, and use those certain pieces of equipment, including those pits,” Egbert said. “We have other opportunities for revenue streams, business opportunities that we’ve said ‘no’ to in the past, that we’ll be able to service downtown.”
Egbert declined to say what those opportunities might be.
The new facility will allow Bill Miller to double the number of restaurants it owns and operates as the only major commissary concept in San Antonio, he said.
The trend toward commissaries, which lets restaurant operators prepare food in one centralized location and serve in others, has flourished in the industry in recent years, said Dawn Ann Larios, executive director for the West region of the Texas Restaurant Association.
“You had to become so creative during the pandemic and a lot of restaurants not only were they investing in food trucks, but they thought commissaries, that’s that’s the way to go, and little by little, they’ve grown over the last few years,” said Larios, whose family once owned a tortilla-making operation in Market Square.
But restaurants are still struggling to stay afloat in a difficult market, even those as established as Bill Miller.
“Commodity pricing and supply chain is still tough,” Egbert said. “We’re seeing major proteins price fluctuations that are with brisket, with chicken, with eggs, for example, those three items are big ticket items for anybody, including us.”
Consumers’ budgets are also strained, he acknowledged.
For its new facility, Bexar County awarded Bill Miller a 10-year, 75% property tax abatement valued at an estimated $1.1 million over the term of the incentive.
The company bought the 57 acres of land at Old Highway 90 and Highway 151 from the City of San Antonio for nearly $3.1 million.
While the facility, designed by the architecture firm RVK, is new for Bill Miller, the pits are just like the ones designed by the founder on the back of paper napkin and still in operation today.
“When we started this process of designing for the new facility, we hired consultants and experts from multiple different backgrounds to come in and audit all of our processes that we do,” Egbert said. “After they looked at [the pits], they said, don’t change a thing.”
