We meet the Shrewsbury couple helping to make your barbecue night easier

The couple, who live in Shrewsbury, founded their business six years ago, after struggling to find suitable fuel for their new pizza oven.

They saw a gap in the market for a company that offered high-quality, sustainable wood with fast delivery.

Now they cater for outdoor cooking enthusiasts as well as those looking to heat their homes – and among their customers is award-winning chef Adam Purnell, aka Shropshire Lad, who uses several of their products at his café Embers, based in Ironbridge.

“We started in the middle of lockdown,” explains Heather, aged 37. “Our holiday to Italy was cancelled so we decided to use that money to buy a pizza oven.

“After we bought the pizza oven we couldn’t get the wood we needed - everything that we were buying online was rubbish quality, it didn’t fit the oven, and it was always delivered in plastic. And as millennials who want everything delivered quickly, we found the website and delivery experiences weren’t great.

“At the time, I was working in logistics with companies like Asos and Pretty Little Thing. All the big e-commerce companies were making it easy for people to shop with minimum number of clicks and next day delivery – but nobody was doing that in the wood space,” she says.

“I was buying wood for our pizza oven and finding that every time we wanted to have a pizza night, I had to spend an hour with an axe, chopping wood down to the right size,” adds Paul, 43.

“And, quite often, I’d load fuel into the oven, and it wouldn’t burn properly. The quality of the fuel was really detracting from what should have been a fun night of cooking.

“It basically felt like all the log companies were just trying to be the cheapest, but what we were looking for was a quality experience – premium wood, sustainable packaging and zero hassle.

“When you want to have a barbecue or a pizza night you’ve got a lot going on with the food you’re cooking, as well as learning how to manage the fire, so you want the fuel to do exactly what you expect – nice and easy to light, performs consistently and gives you the heat and flavour you’re looking for. The main thing we really struggled with was finding that consistency.”

The couple decided to combine Paul’s love for outdoor cooking with Heather’s logistics background to create a modern business aimed at those who “want to buy it today and get it tomorrow”.

“The whole wood industry was very old-school and backwards and Heather’s idea was to drag it into the 21st century kicking and screaming,” says Paul.

The couple quit their jobs, set up the business and began trading in August 2020. They started by offering wood for pizza ovens and, later, began selling logs for log burners before branching out into charcoal and smoking wood the following summer. Barbecue is now the heart of their business throughout summer.

“The quality of the product is an absolute non-negotiable for us, and our motto is, ‘if we wouldn’t use it, we won’t sell it’,” says Paul.

“We think we sell the UK’s largest range of species of splits for offset smokers, and we sell specially cut wood for almost every brand of pizza oven that’s sold in the UK,” says Heather.

They’ve witnessed a huge rise in the popularity of outdoor cooking in recent years.

“We set up the business around the time Covid was causing this real jump in the popularity of cooking outdoors.

"We had really great weather for most of the summer, people couldn’t go out but we could start socialising in gardens – so barbecues and pizza ovens were a natural thing to happen at that time and we rode that wave.

“Then, I think there were a couple of years perhaps when holidays got popular again because Covid faded away and we could travel again.

“But this summer and last summer, I think we’re really in a period of increased popularity, particularly with barbecuing. A lot of people are deciding to invest in the equipment they are cooking on outdoors and they are thinking of their barbecues as much more than something they just do in a rush on a Sunday.

“I actually think cooking on the barbecue is becoming quite a mainstream thing for a lot of people,” says Paul.

Love Logs have continued to capitalise on the increase in popularity of outdoor cooking by expanding their retail range, developing products to suit bricks and mortar retail, and you can now find their products in almost 50 garden centres, butchers and specialist BBQ shops across the UK.

With the growing interest in outdoor cooking, the couple are keen to encourage more people to carefully consider the fuel they are using for their barbecue.

“People are happy to spend a lot of money on a great cut of meat but then they cook that over £2.50 supermarket charcoal which has probably been sourced from a tropical location or sub-Saharan Africa, and is probably soaked in petroleum-based lighter fluid – that will give you a petrol smell while you are cooking it and a funky taste while you eat it,” says Heather, who is originally from Stourbridge.

“We try to get people to think about fuel as an ingredient when you are barbecuing, not just an afterthought, because great quality charcoal and great quality wood really does impact the taste of your food,” she adds.

Sustainability is very important to the couple, who source all their products sustainably, plant a tree for every order with charity Ripple Africa, and use completely plastic-free packaging across their whole range.

“Our British charcoal comes from a supplier in Hereford, and we’ve walked around the woodland the producer owns, where a lot of his wood comes from – so you’ve got complete traceability,” says Paul.

“When he puts charcoal in a bag, it goes in the bag exactly how it’s made and it gets shipped out to the customer – and you know in that bag, it’s just charcoal. Anything that says ‘instant light’ on the bag has had something added to it, and good charcoal doesn’t need that.

“I think when we talk to people about what instant light charcoal is, you see the light bulb moment and they realise that’s what they are buying and most people think ‘I probably won’t buy that anymore’. A big part of our business is trying to get people to think about it and learn more about the products they’re buying before they use them.”

Love Logs now sells both British and Spanish charcoal, which have different qualities, and Paul tries to get people to see them as different tools.

“British charcoal is a craft product,” says Paul. “It’s very laborious to make.

"When you’re running the kilns, you have to be with them for the whole process which can take 12 to 24 hours, and the outcome of this is that you might only make 400 kilos of charcoal.

“So they’re making very small batches, but the charcoal they produce is incredibly high-quality. It’s super easy to light, there’s almost no smoke, and it’s very easy to control the temperature of your barbecue exactly as you want it.

“By buying a British product, you’re supporting a product that’s coming out of a local woodland and we’re very good at woodland management in the UK. So, by using British charcoal, you’re actively contributing to the future of our woodlands.

“Last year, we were approached by a chain of garden centres, and they were looking to replace a product that they imported from another part of the world by finding something more sustainable, that performs just as well.

“I went off on a bit of a sourcing mission. I knew it wasn’t going to be the British charcoal because, unfortunately, there just isn’t enough capacity in the industry for a project like this. I landed on a Spanish charcoal after being referred by one of our stockists.

“Spain reportedly produces seven or eight times more hardwood than we do in the UK every year simply from their agriculture industry. They’re growing olives, acorns, nuts and fruit, and through the management of orchards and their “Dehesa” woodlands, by pruning and cutting down dead trees, they produce that much more wood than we do through woodland management.

"Spain, as result, has become the second biggest charcoal producer in Europe because they realise they’ve got a resource – they’ve got this enormous supply of wood that they can turn into charcoal, as well as firewood to be used domestically.

“We now import Spanish Holm Oak charcoal and if you compare that to the British charcoal, it’s right at the other end in terms of how it performs. So, you’ve got the British, that’s lightweight, easy to light, burns nice and hot and reasonably quickly.

“For an everyday barbecue the British stuff is perfect. The Spanish charcoal is very dense because it comes from typically very old trees, so the charcoal is denser and burns for much longer than the British stuff. With the recent rise in popularity, people are looking to do long, slow cooks on their barbecues and smokers, and they need a charcoal that burns for longer.

“It opened our eyes a bit because we were so focussed on the British being more sustainable, but then we learned that actually with these trees being pruned or cut down anyway, there’s this lovely sustainability of these products coming out of Spain.”

At their home in Shrewsbury, Paul can be found cooking on his barbecue five or six nights a week.

“The reason I do it is that it’s obviously lovely being outside while you cook but, secondly, I think, as a reasonably competent home cook, cooking food over fire makes it that much better, it’s a bit of a cheat code to better cooking” he explains.

“Your average barbecuer is cooking from May until September, my window has always been March through to October. It’s really rain that stops play for me because we haven’t got a covered outdoor cooking area – I would love to do that one day, but it’s a big investment when you’re running a small business.

“The biggest explosion in the popularity of barbecues has been what’s called ceramic-style, or kamado-style barbecues. We got one of those a year ago for the first time and that’s been a bit of a game changer for me with cooking outside all year round, because you can light the barbecue, and once the food’s on and you put the lid down, it’s basically safely cooking on its own, there’s no fire risk with the lid down.

“There’s also a much lower risk of burning your food, so you can put it on and pop back inside for five or 10 minutes and go back to it. While I wouldn’t do that at the moment while the weather is so dry, in the winter when things are wet outside, you can almost barbecue from indoors. It’s become a year-round thing for me.

“What we tend to see is that around the time the kids go back to school, the majority of people, we think, stop barbecuing – but it is very weather driven. If there was an Indian summer or late heatwave, we would see a spike – but if the weather shifts into wet autumnal weather quickly then we would see it drop off pretty quickly. We’re hoping that the average person starts to enjoy a longer BBQ season and cook outdoors more whatever the weather” he adds.

For anyone looking for inspiration for their cooking, there are a wide range of recipes and how-to guides on the Love Logs website.

“We’ve focussed on using the website as a learning resource so customers can learn from my experience, and I try and share that in layman’s terms because that’s what I am, and that’s how I have learned to cook,” says Paul.

When asked what they enjoy about running Love Logs, Heather says: “The freedom – there is only the two of us in the business so it’s only us that we have to answer to. We can work flexibly (although the truth is we’ve never worked so hard!) and we make all decisions together.

“Because we use third-party warehouses, we are flexible about where we can work from and that’s great because it means we can spend a lot of time on the road meeting customers, promoting the business at barbecue festivals, for example, and get really involved in the community.

" The barbecue community you find on social media is a really friendly, very cool thing to be involved in.”

“For me, we started the business because I got into enjoying using our wood-fired oven, so I think it’s a case of turning a hobby into a job,” says Paul.

“Everyone says if you can do something you love as your job then you’re really, really lucky, and I feel very lucky to have turned a passion into my job. I’ve also loved taking some basic skills in marketing that I’d used a little in my previous work, honing them and developing our own brand. And like Heather says, the community is amazing. There are the celebrity/Instagram chef community, and we’ve met some lovely people there, like Adam.

"Then there are the passionate home cooks, these are the guys that probably barbecue more than I do at home because they’ve found something they love doing.

“We’ve talked to people who have struggled with their mental health, then started cooking outside and found it helped – how cool is that?

“There are people like me who’ve found this way to make their food better, and that’s the reason they barbecue. There are other people who are obsessive about American culture and that’s what it means to them.

“There are all these different people from different walks of life, and they’re completely different from each other, but they’re united by this one thing – cooking outdoors. And I just think that’s really, really cool.”

“Also, for me, I get to eat some really good food almost every day because Paul is always cooking to learn, to write a recipe or for social media, so my dinner is always amazing – wood-fired steak, slow cooked tacos, fresh fish, chargrilled vegetables… I eat very, very well,” adds Heather.

Paul and Heather will be exhibiting at garden retail trade show Glee 2026 at the NEC Birmingham from September 8-10. If you run or buy for a Garden Centre, Butchers, Farm Shop or specialist BBQ Shop, they’d love to meet you.

For more information aboutLove Logs, visit www.love-logs.com