Grow Where God Plants You: Big J's SoCal BBQ Is Betting on Bloomington

Jason Hernandez went to seven different elementary schools before his family landed in Bloomington. Then he stayed. “Bloomington’s my home,” he says, and everything he is building with Big J’s SoCal BBQ starts from there.

He went to junior high and high school in town, came away with football championship rings, coached for seven years, and now has children at Zimmerman and Bloomington High School. He calls himself an ambassador for Bloomington, and when he joined the BCC, the chamber asked him to become an official one. He said yes, then thought about how much responsibility that is.

The bus wanted him

“I didn’t want the bus. The bus wanted me, I guess.” A local auto shop owner on Cedar and Ninth Street, a man Hernandez respects for letting customers drive off and pay later, offered him a bus with a new engine and the seats already removed. Hernandez was worried about falling behind on payments. Then he looked inside and saw a rolling billboard for his brand. He lined up sponsors, including a credit union and a meat supplier in Colton, and at the time of recording the bus was headed for its wrap.

How the operation works

Big J’s cooks out of a shared commercial kitchen in Redlands, where Hernandez licensed his catering so that everything stays county compliant. The heart of the business is on-site catering: he brings a big Santa Maria grill and a 290-gallon Texas smoker to the event and cooks there. With the bus, the goal is to serve every day. He planned to set up Wednesday through Sunday at Santa Ana and Cedar.

He also handles deliveries himself instead of using app services, timed to the customer’s lunch break, a habit from his years working for the City of Riverside, where he knew exactly when the union break hit. One recent order was a 22-sandwich drop-off for a community program in San Bernardino.

The menu blends competition-style California barbecue with Mexican-American flavors: tri-tip sandwiches, brisket, barbecue chicken, a pastrami sandwich with half a pound of meat, and tacos with brisket, asada, pastor and pulled pork. He has also run a coloring contest for kids that ends in $1 tacos.

A champion for the little guy

Hernandez lights up talking about Bloomington’s street vendors, whom he calls “the essence of the beautiful part of small business.” He remembers a dirt lot lined with two rows of food stands, where his family would each eat something different, before new development pushed them out and scattered the vendors along Valley, Cedar and Santa Ana.

He has watched warehouses swallow a neighborhood before, growing up in the area that became the City of Industry, and he sees the same thing happening in Bloomington, sometimes with buildings left empty. His idea: take one of those empty warehouses, which already has the parking, and turn it into a community market.

He does not want to tell other vendors what to do. He wants to befriend them, send Spanish-speaking team members to talk with them, and hand out tarps so they can keep the dust down under their canopies. “Let’s be collaborative,” he says. He also wants to pass along the free help he got. “I’m a product of the Small Business Development Center, so it’s free.”

Your past isn’t your future

The message Hernandez most wanted to share on the podcast is personal. At 20, he served six months in county jail, where he took culinary arts through the Regional Occupational Program. He did not realize then how much that training would help him later.

Today Big J’s hires people who have been impacted by the system. He describes one team member who is opening a bank account, getting off probation and moving out of a halfway house. When she graduated from a training program, he was the only one in the audience for her. He is setting up payroll for his team of four. “I want to help other people pay their bills,” he says. “Your past isn’t your future.”

Why the chamber

Hernandez saw what a chamber could do in Riverside, where the chamber held a ribbon cutting for him and opened doors to catering events across the city. In Bloomington, he wanted community and a voice for owners like him. “I’m just a regular guy that wants to help the other regular guys.”

His advice for new members is simple: do not sit in the corner at a mixer. Go say hi to everybody, find the people who can help with what you cannot do yourself, and turn the side hustle into the main hustle. He had been a member for less than a month when this episode was recorded, and he called 2026 his breakout year.