Award-winning London pizza delivery company Basilico use only the best ingredients, fior de latte mozzarella, prosciutto, Parma ham and special flours from Italy – and wood from North Wales.
One hundred and fifty tons of Blazers fuel logs, made by Ruthin-based Clifford Jones Timber, are shipped to Basilico every year to fire their ten-ton brick-built pizza ovens.
They heat the ovens at Basilico’s eight pizzerias to a Vesuvian 500C to fuel the only wood-fired pizza delivery service in the world – in those searing temperatures it takes just three minutes to produce the perfect pizza.
Basilico even make a massive 18-inch pizza and the results have been rewarded by rave reviews in national newspapers and magazines like The Observer, Time Out and Daily Mirror.
The Blazers logs are an interesting product diversification for a company which is the UK’s largest producer of fence posts – they churn out about four million a year at their main plant in Ruthin, in Denbighshire, and at a second operation at Gretna, in the Scottish Borders.
But it works for Basilico and Operations Director Mauricio Cabrera Onetto said: “The Blazers logs from Clifford Jones are ideal for us because if we used traditional logs it’s very difficult to get them a uniform shape and size.
“Sawn logs also still have bark on them and that harbours all sorts of creatures and other things so Blazers suit us because they are predictable and we know how much we need for a cooking session.
“They’re clean, they’re easy to handle and they come in bags of ten five and they’re from sustainable forests and that’s important to us as well for ethical reasons.
“What Clifford Jones supply us with is perfect – it’s sustainable and eco-friendly and while we could import a similar product from Italy it would cost much more and have a bigger carbon footprint and we’re happy to support the forestry business in Wales.”
Each of their eight restaurants gets through five 10 kilogramme bags of Blazers logs each day, that’s 15,000 bags a year.
Nigel Bacon, Sales Director for Clifford Jones Timber, said: “Basilico really are the gourmet version of pizza delivery and we’re delighted to be associated with such a prestigious client.
“They only use the very best ingredients and they make their pizzas in traditional ovens and our logs work really well for them.
“We are a timber company but it is part of our ethos to make use of everything that comes through our gates and we have been making Blazers logs for ten years and they have been a very successful product.
“They are 100 per cent natural wood with no additives. They’re held together by the natural lignin in the wood which is released because of the heat and pressure under which they are produced.
“They have only 12 per cent water – natural timber can be over 65 per cent water – and burn with a natural flame in an open fire or wood burning stove – they’re ideal for chimineas – and give off a tremendous amount of heat and produce less tar, which means you will have a cleaner chimney.”
Clifford Jones Timber was founded by Alan Jones’s father in 1948 and has been at its Ruthin base for 25 years: “When we started here there were two people employed here and now there are 77,” he said.
“Every piece of timber that comes through these gates is used. There isn’t any wasted and there aren’t many industries that can say that.”
As well as the heating products and fence posts, they also produce laminated timber for the construction and leisure industries– they won a £250,000 contract to provide over 600 lampposts for Center Parc’s new Woburn Forest holiday village which will open in the spring – gates, bedding for horses and even cat litter.
The wood pellet side of the business was launched in 2008 after the construction of a £5 million, 20,000 square foot factory at the Ruthin site on Brickfield Lane and it now produces 30,000 tons of fuel pellets every year.
