Duraflame, the company behind popular charcoal and wood product brands B&B, Western, an Cowboy, had a catastrophic fire at the end of July at their Pleasanton, TX plant. Fortunately, there were no injuries from the fire.

At the time of the fire, Duraflame had the following statement about the blaze.

On Saturday July 26, there was a catastrophic fire at the WW Wood cooking wood fuels production plant located in Pleasanton, TX just south of San Antonio. WW Wood is a subsidiary of Duraflame, Inc. A significant amount of the production capability at the facility has been destroyed. Fortunately, there were no injuries to any of our employees or the brave fire fighters who battled the significant blaze.

As the largest supplier of cooking wood fuel products in the USA, we have redundancy built into our operations and we have available production capacity for cooking wood products (Chips, chunks and grill-wood logs) located at our other wood production sites in Ennis, TX and West Plains, MO. Many of our customers are not serviced from the Pleasanton location and will not be affected by this fire. We will be working with impacted customers to provide them with alternate supply options from our other facilities until we can assess the damage and implement a recovery plan at the WW Wood site.

Duraflame is a resilient, privately held, third generation family company. We have encountered many business challenges over the years and successfully overcome them. We will quickly address this unfortunate impact on our business and our WW Wood employees and continue our mission to supply consumers across the country with great quality grilling wood products.

We want to especially thank the brave first responders and firefighters from Pleasanton and Atascosa County, Texas who worked so hard to put out the fire and minimize loss.

Chris Caron, President of Duraflame

Fires at wood and charcoal facilities can be difficult to combat because the products in the facility are specifically designed to burn. In recent memory we’ve seen fires at a Blues Hog storage facility that took a while to finish burning, and at a pellet supplier that was a sister company to Camp Chef.

Luckily for Duraflame, and thanks to the hard work of the firefighters, the fire was contained before it spread to other areas of their Pleasanton facility. Chis Caron, President of Duraflame, tells CookOut News that they’ve been able to use other areas of the facility and flex capacity at other plants to maintain their production volume.

We produce cooking wood products under the Western and B&B brands at three locations; WW Wood Pleasanton, TX, Barbecue Wood Flavors, Ennis TX, and Timberland Forest Products, West Plains MO.  These locations also produce private brands for retailers and other distributors. The fire at the WW Wood facility in Pleasanton, TX that occurred on Saturday July 26 destroyed a warehouse and several packaging machines, but our wood processing, saw stations, splitting equipment, chunking and chipping equipment were not damaged.

Within about 2 weeks after the fire we restarted the wood processing operations and were able to bring about half of the employees back that were displaced by the fire.

The processed wood is being shipped to our Ennis, TX wood packaging facility that had excess packing capacity. We have started a second shift for packaging at Ennis to enable that facility to pack orders that were previously produced at the WW Wood facility in Pleasanton, TX.

Chris Caron, President of Duraflame

It took a big effort by the Duraflame team to be able to avoid major disruptions. That was especially true given the fire happened during grilling season with Labor Day right around the corner.

Some customer shipments were delayed during the Month of August but we are pleased to report that we were able to service all customer orders by Labor Day Weekend and we are now shipping orders for all brands and customers on time.

Chris Caron, President of Duraflame

For the employees displaced by the fire, Duraflame has worked with public employment resources to help with outplacement and job training services. They’re also working on recovery plans for the facility to bring some production capacity back.

We continue to work on recovery plans at the Pleasanton facility, and we expect to be packaging products on a smaller scale in Pleasanton again by the end of October, 2025.

Chris Caron, President of Duraflame