More than 300 emerald ceramic domes will line up at Gwinnett Field in Lawrenceville this Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for the 29th annual EGGtoberfest, and Big Green Egg is waiving admission for anyone who shows up with a permanent tattoo of the brand's logo. Organizers expect upward of 5,000 attendees for a festival that has grown from a niche grilling meet-up into one of Metro Atlanta's most fanatical fan gatherings.
The scale of devotion on display is hard to overstate, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The AJC has described a Finnish pitmaster with a Big Green Egg forearm tattoo that reads “Ribsejä ei keitetä,” a Finnish phrase. Taylor Carroll is also expected at the festival. Big Green Egg CEO Dan Gertsacov, who leads the Tucker, Georgia-based company, put the brand's appeal simply: “Nobody invites friends over to microwave.”
A Grill That Became a Ministry
The festival's food lineup reflects just how far backyard grilling culture has traveled from simple burgers: pork belly burnt ends, Dutch oven cobblers, seared Wagyu beef, and wood-fired pound cakes are all on the menu, per the AJC's reporting. Cookers at the event are set anywhere from 200 to 700 degrees, capable of everything from low-and-slow smoking to searing.
For some owners, the Egg has become something closer to a calling than a hobby. Bart Hotchkiss prepared a smoked Christmas turkey on his Big Green Egg in Midland, Texas, and served food to grieving neighbors, a gesture his family came to call a “chicken ministry,” according to the same AJC report. Black Girls Grilling has picked up multiple People's Choice awards at past EGGtoberfests, another marker of how the community has built its own traditions and rivalries around the cooker.
A Samurai-Armored Egg
At the October 2025 EGGtoberfest, Hisashi Kato, founder of Kamado Q, brought a samurai-armored Big Green Egg.
Big Green Egg was founded by Ed Fisher, who promoted the cooker in newspaper advertisements. The design derives from Japanese kamados used for centuries; American servicemen brought kamados back from Japan. Big Green Egg has an online Egghead community.
Georgia Tech Ceramics and a Mexican Manufacturing Partner
The material science behind the Egg's durability traces to an unlikely source. Georgia Tech researchers helped develop the high-tech ceramic formulas used in the cookers, adapting technology originally created for NASA's space shuttle heat shields, according to Atlanta Magazine. The cooker's fired-clay insulation was prone to cracking.
Today, the primary ceramic bodies for all Big Green Egg cookers are manufactured in Monterrey, Mexico, through a long-standing partnership with industrial ceramics company Daltile, according to mikamado.es. The company has an office, retail store, culinary training center, and brand museum near Atlanta's Spaghetti Junction.
A Festival Born in a Parking Lot
EGGtoberfest's massive scale looks a long way from its beginnings. The event originated in 1998 as an informal grassroots gathering organized by members of an online Big Green Egg forum, drawing about 100 people and 15 cookers to an Atlanta American Legion parking lot, per Atlanta Magazine's reporting. Twenty-eight years later, it has become a multi-day draw for thousands of self-described Eggheads.
The 2024 festival also had a charitable dimension. During the brand's 50th-anniversary festival at Coolray Field in October 2024, Big Green Egg set a Guinness World Record for the largest serving of chicken wings, preparing 655.8 pounds of wings across 47 extra-large ceramic grills — a callback to the first dish founder Ed Fisher cooked for sidewalk customers in 1974. More than half of those wings were donated to Metro Atlanta food ministry Lettum' Eat and to local disaster relief efforts, according to Sightseers' Delight.
That same year, Big Green Egg matched $50,000 in attendee donations at EGGtoberfest, raising more than $125,000 in three days for disaster relief nonprofit Operation BBQ Relief in the wake of Hurricane Helene, the company said in its own recap. Cook teams from across 50 states and 25 countries mobilized during that festival to support the relief effort. CEO Gertsacov has said he tracks Google Alerts for the Big Green Egg name and finds it mentioned in obituaries once or twice a month, as grieving families list grilling on the Egg among their loved one's favorite pastimes — a small but telling sign of how deeply the cooker has settled into owners' lives.
