The third time turned out to be a charm for Calgary’s Janice Smella and her ‘Smellaque’ team who took home first place at the 37th annual Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue in Lynchburg, Tennessee. In her third year competing in the October event, Smella beat out 75 elite domestic state champions and 24 international teams from destinations as far away as New Zealand, Estonia and Brazil, earning her a trophy and $25,000 prize along with the chance to defend her title in 2027. “You don’t know your results until the very end at the award ceremony and there’s many times where we’ll be at a competition (and) I’m like, I had a good cook and that is good enough for me,” she said. “But it was a complete shock, I laugh now in hindsight but it took us 20 minutes to get up to the stage because the community is so supportive and so loving, people came out of their seats to come congratulate us, to give us hugs.” Smella doesn’t own a restaurant or food truck but the pitmaster has a passion for cooking low-and-slow with live-fire smoking and barbecuing alongside of her family. “We’ve been competing in barbecue for 12 years,” she said. “So it really was a hobby, I was in the energy industry for 20-plus years and now I’m fortunate just to do what I like and to cook and travel as much as I like.” The Jack The competition is known as ‘The Jack’. Smella hand picked a team of pitmasters to join her in Tennessee. They took care of competing in ancillary categories consisting of a chef’s choice, desert and sauce. Smella and her daughter Katie took on the four main categories of chicken, pork ribs, pork shoulder and beef brisket. Katie, who is 17-years-old and has been competing for longer than she can remember, focused on chicken. “I used my mom’s recipe for our chicken,” she said. “I used her spices and more of her process but I did it my way from when I compete by myself, which is a bit different because her chicken’s been struggling a bit and I feel like, I don’t know, I’m so comfortable working with chicken, it’s easy but just kind of have fun with it and make sure the flavour is balanced.” ‘The barbecue Mount Everest’ Darren Clark was part of the Smellaque entourage and is also a pitmaster with his own team called ‘Notorious P.I.G.’ who first competed at The Jack in 2024. “I call it the barbecue Mount Everest,” he said. “So every competitive barbecue team wants to go and just to compete at The Jack, so to be invited to come down and help out your friends, it’s a huge honour.” Competitive community Clark says competitive barbecue is a community that treats each other like family. “That’s literally what it’s like, we compete alongside these guys and when we’re competing against them we want to beat them,” he said. “We’re always wanting to kind of be that team that comes out on top, but at the end of the day we all want to see each other do well.” Smella says that support was overwhelming at this year’s event and she says some of the best advice she received was being told to cook how she would normally cook and that helped her relax and enjoy the experience. “So really at the end of the day your meat has to taste good and it’s got to be pleasing to everybody,” she said. “So a little salt, a little sugar, there’s little flavour profiles that can be added like pecan or cherry --but at the end of the day it needs to be balanced, but it also needs to stand out.” Janice Smella is the second woman to win The Jack and the first Canadian team to take home top prize. “When we go down into - I don’t want to say enemy territory, but when we go down into the U.S. and compete at a very prestigious American barbecue competition, of course we want to see Canadians do well,” said Clark. “And you know, being able to be a part of that is a huge, huge honour.”
