Jun. 15—DICKINSON — The Bakken BBQ served up a full plate of excitement, with a giant crowd touring the West River Ice Center parking lot, enjoying free BBQ provided by various companies. The event fostered a spirit of competition, but more importantly, it was about giving back to the community. The money raised goes to local nonprofit organizations.

Peak Automation and Electrical won second place in the People’s Choice category. Owner Robert Todd and his team earned silver with their innovative and creative spicy raspberry and mango-flavored ribs, cooked with cherry and hickory wood. Denny’s Electric took first place, though despite finishing as runners-up, Todd and his team felt content, knowing that the main purpose of the event was to raise money for a good cause.

The primary aim of the Bakken BBQ is to support local charities. This year, the event spotlighted Make-A-Wish North Dakota and provided Make-A-Wish recipient Kyleigh with tickets to see her favorite artist, Taylor Swift.

“It was fun and great to raise money for a good cause and a good event to get the team out and do a little bit of team building in the process,” Todd said. “It creates that family feel a little bit when you get the company out and do things like this.”

This was only the second year that Peak Automation and Electrical competed at the Bakken BBQ, but they came prepared. With the assitants of their technician Bobby Reeder, they used a FB3000 system paired with a variable frequency drive advanced their grilling process. Todd likened it to “grilling with cruise control,” calling it the Peak Smoke Pro.

“We use it in the field for our customers and it was probably a little too much horsepower for the application, but we use it to operate our grill,” Todd said. “Not only as a training exercise for some of our guys who aren’t as familiar with this new product, but also to show our capabilities to our customers. We can control the speeds of our blowers into our firebox and set that up so the blowers would add more air to our firebox, maintaining a steady temperature throughout our cooking chamber. It gave us more accurate data and we could watch it from our phone, not having to sit there watching the gauge on the smoker because of the wifi side of it.”

Todd added that they could technically watch and control the temperature settings from anywhere using the wifi application connected to the Peak Smoke Pro.