Flybe / July 18

72 / 116

72 / Flight Time / JULY 2018
Me & My Business
premium products meant that, by 2017, demand
was threatening to outstrip supply.
At the same time, the restaurants that once
drove growth were tightening their belts. The
company needed to find a new – plentiful and
cheaper – source of charcoal, to sell alongside
their premium core product.
In 2017, Matt and Simon brought in David
McKechnie, who has a background exporting
raw materials from Africa, as Commercial
Director. “Matt knew about marabou charcoal
from Cuba,” David tells me. “He set me on a
Yellow Brick Road to get hold of some. It grows
as a weed all over Cuba but someone discovered
it makes amazing charcoal. We are actually
sourcing it from a Portuguese company that
already has the relationships with Cuba.”
While David oversees the company’s
move into this new phase – he says the
great weather in May helped drive Oxford
Charcoal’s biggest month ever
– Matt continues to focus on
the core product.
“Business is not my forte,”
he laughs. “But creative and
slightly-unhinged activities? I’m
pretty good at those!”
Living and working in woodlands where
many Oxford University scientists carried out
field work, Matt had access to informal advice
as his interest in the subtle responses of wood
to heat grew. One of his University connections
put him in touch with timber entrepreneur
Simon Fineman. “I told Simon we would need
£150-£200k to design and construct a new kiln
and get the business going. It turned out to be
significantly more.”
Matt travelled Europe and found businesses
with similar ideas to his own. He paid £30,000
for a kiln he had discovered in Ukraine. It was
rudimentary and possibly unsafe. But it was a
starting point.
“The process took 24 hours to turn each batch
of wood into charcoal – I had to stay awake for 24
hours to make sure the kiln wasn’t overheating
and open the safety valve manually. Otherwise,
the kiln would have been like a giant bomb! Then
I’d sleep for four hours in my
shed… and start again.
“I was in my element. I was
nearly blown up a couple of
times, but within 10 months
I had learned so much.
We worked on creating an
automated safety process and
eventually had a new kiln built.”
The first customers were local. “I sold little
3kg boxes in farm shops. Soon, chefs were
coming back saying how amazing the flavours
were: the hazel charcoal gave fish an amazing
flavour; wild cherry charcoal worked really well
with duck or venison. Suddenly, we found a
market in high-end restaurants.
“Telling people your product is sustainable
and ethical can only take you so far: they want
to know it’s a really good product too!”
The quality of the product has driven word-
of-mouth growth. “Social media is great for
telling people your story.”
Though the company is now the largest
UK-based charcoal producer, Oxford Charcoal
has less than 1 per cent of the volume of the UK
market. Mass-market charcoal retails at around
£1 per kilogramme, while Oxford Charcoal is
priced up to £4. Nonetheless, the appetite for
“Soon, chefs were coming back saying how
amazing the flavours were: the hazel
charcoal gave fish an amazing flavour; wild
cherry charcoal worked really well with
duck or venison. Suddenly, we found a
market in high-end restaurants”