Ronell Norman is the proud owner of Big Daddy’s Smoked BBQ, an outlet that specializes in bringing delicious and healthy helpings of smoked Turkey BBQ to events big and small near you.
The son of Mary L Hyman and Albert Norman, Norman has been passionate about food and its preparation since he was a kid. He in fact, picked up his passion for cuisine from his parents.
A lifelong lover of food, Norman says that he owes his palette and general good taste to his father.
“Now my mom can cook but my dad, he had a serious palette,” he says. “You could bring him a dish and he knew exactly what’s was in it and what you seasoned it with.”
However, it was his mother who truly got him started on the grill.
“My mother worked at Weyerhaeuser and she got a small table top grill as a company gift that she brought home. That was what I started cooking on, way back in the sixth grade,“ he recalls. “My mom taught how to get started and how to season food… it started with her showing me how to properly prepare a hamburger and it just went from there….I was grill in everything…I just fell in love with the way raw food transforms into something beautiful under the right care.”
Indeed, Norman cooking became his favored hobby, even receiving top awards in home economics in high school.
However,
After graduating from Plymouth High School in 1993, Norman decided to forgo the more traditional path of higher education and break his family’s mold of military service.
“You know after high school, I just wanted to really do something different,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of family that went into the military, my brothers did that. In my family, you either went to work at Weyerhaeuser or you went to the military. I wanted to break away from that.”
Norman decided to break those Plymouth norms by getting his CDLs and becoming a truck driver for Ferguson Enterprises, a profession he was a part of a well over a decade.
Despite his earlier desire to break away from joining a manufacturing plant, Norman would ironically embrace the family tradition of joining the Weyerhaeuser workforce. However, that decision was more of a desire for personal change rather than a financial decision.
“I really did resist it at first…I told myself I wouldn’t do it. But let me tell you. Driving truck and putting on all that weight under the steering wheel…I said you know what, maybe I oughta go to Weyerhaeuser,” he laughs...
