Mark Rogers of Smoke & Spice is passionate about professionally sanctioned barbecue contests.  Mark and his wife Ingrid have traveled from Miami to Kansas city competing in  sanctioned regional and national barbeque contests, including the American Royal Invitational BBQ cook-off and the Jack Daniels World Championship Invitational BBQ  contest.  The Smoke & Spice team has won more than 70 sanctioned barbeque awards and tens of thousands of dollars in prize money.  A sanctioned barbeque contest as described by the Florida Barbecue Association is a gathering of cook teams that are preparing specific categories of meat, to be submitted for judging at an assigned time, and to be judged by persons certified by the sanctioning body to use a predetermined set of criteria to rank the products presented to them.