The Perfect Six Nations Commercial Woodfired Pizza Oven Strategy

Ready for the 2025 Six Nations?  Sporting events like this, for which groups of friends gather and share in the highs and the lows, are perfect for pubs and bars wanting to get the tills ringing.  To do that, the combination of beer, wine and wood-fired pizza is a proven winner.

Such occasions are equally great news for mobile pizza caterers, who can pitch their mobile outlet close to housing estates and apartment blocks, or alternatively busy and hungry campsites and caravan parks.  Wherever they turn up, locals can enjoy a great pre-match, half-time or full-time pizza treat. Grabbing a wood-fired pizza, before the goals go in, is the perfect solution for many footie fans.

But years of big sports tournaments – as will be the case in 2026 with the FIFA World Cup - are also ones in which restaurants, pubs and mobile pizza caterers can get it sadly wrong and come crashing down to reality very soon after the trophy has been lifted.  The compulsion and rush to get a commercial wood-fired oven in before the first ball is kicked, often leads to poor business decisions.  The investment made in many commercial wood-fired ovens is a complete waste of money, as proven when the wood oven fails to function or falls apart in an alarmingly short space of time.

How to buy a commercial or mobile wood fired pizza oven

Those who get it right are those who focus on the team tactics behind a wood-fired oven.  They realise that their oven manufacturer has to have the right game plan and that this starts with the materials.  If materials that are intended for other purposes – such as storage heaters – are transferred into oven manufacture, you are almost bound to end up with a less than adequate end-product.  

Similarly, if you don’t have first-class insulation, you find yourself with a red-hot wood fired oven shell that is a health and safety hazard.  Typically, you will also suffer extremely poor cooking performance and under-par pizzas.  You’ll soon see the ‘crowd’ walking away.

Commercial wood fired oven buying considerations

Too many oven manufacturers have tinkered with the line-up of materials, brought in ‘substitute’ products to try to emulate those used in real, authentic wood-fired ovens and used their oven manufacture as almost a training ground exercise, trying to find something that will work.  The majority of it just doesn’t.

The reason for this is two-fold.  Firstly, these manufacturers don’t adopt the artisan approach that our supplier Valoriani has embraced for many generations.  They simply want to pile things high and fast.  They don’t put in the time, dedication and craftsmanship to create a woodfired oven that will last and perform for 20 years or more, because they want repeat sales and have the mindset so commonplace within our throwaway culture. 

Secondly, they simply don’t have the right materials at their disposal and, with their desire for profit margins, would struggle to source the right material at a price that suits their pricing model.  Many me-too commercial and domestic wood-fired pizza ovens are using poor materials but masking this with a mid-range price point that suggests they have created a trustworthy product.

Commercial and mobile woodfired oven disaster stories

Many commercial customers feel the full impact of this when they buy what is a fairly expensive oven and then have to rip it out and replace it within a year, or even less in some cases.  

Woodfired pizza ovens in this bracket are often only suitable for domestic use at best – although failure rates there are just as high. They cannot cope with the throughput of a commercial kitchen or mobile catering operation. At Orchard Ovens, we see so many of these distress stories in commercial kitchens, because we typically have to launch a rescue mission and give them a wood-fired pizza oven that does the job they wanted the original oven to do.

The answer to all of this is to show the red card to inferior wood fired ovens before you draft them into your squad.  Here’s how to go about it:

Pre-qualification

-       Focus on a strong pre-qualification exercise.  Do your research and really dig into the construction of your wood-fired oven.  Is it constructed of refractory clay, as an artisan oven should be?  Can it boast the superior performance of Valoriani’s unique ‘cotto’ clay?

Longevity

-       Examine longevity.  Don’t look at videos of recent commercial pizza oven installations; ask for examples that have been in commercial kitchens for five years or more.  Form is temporary; class is permanent.  Many commercial Valoriani wood-fired ovens have gone way past a decade of usage, with no dip in end-product.

End product

-       Do consider that end-product and focus on what it will take to achieve your catering goals and maintain your reputation for good food.  An oven that cannot retain heat, which is slow to fire up and which needs constant fuelling, simply to try to keep the heat within, will be no friend to your business.  Talk to other non-rival mobile caterers to learn how they view their woodburning pizza oven and assess what customers say about their wood-fired pizzas and other wood-cooked dishes.  

Our Fornino ’75 Valoriani oven certainly seems to have no peers in the mobile pizza catering sector, where we are continually replacing other pizza ovens and equipping mobile caterers with the wood-fired oven that will become their star player.  But it’s also the ideal oven for any pub or restaurant needing a wood burning oven in their line-up quickly, being a wheelable solution or one that can be situated on a static base, inside or outside, with the minimum of installation works. It really is ready-to-go.

Gas-fired pizza ovens and commercial electric pizza oven

-       Cheat, if necessary.  If you can’t manage to cook with wood, equip yourself with an oven that has proven itself to cook pizzas with all the same credentials as a wood-fired pizza, so that the difference is barely perceptible.

Our Fornino 75 comes with a gas option, if a caterer prefers that, whilst 2023 saw the arrival of the first electric commercial oven from Valoriani – the Maximo.  This has received rave reviews, because it has all of the core credentials of a Valoriani oven, in terms of craftsmanship, dedication from the back-room team and materials, but uses electricity, not wood.

DEFRA certified wood-fired pizza oven 

-       Don’t cheat when it comes to emissions!  If you are going to be catering in a Smoke Control Area, you need a woodburning oven with DEFRA certification – and one that genuinely has that certification and is not just claiming to have attained it.  All Valoriani ovens have passed DEFRA’s emissions test and can cook wood fired pizzas in a carbon-neutral way.

If you get all of this right, you could breeze through the tournament, with the right captain of commercial wood fired pizza ovens by your side.  If you recognise that needs to be Valoriani, please call us on 07743 847647.

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Editors notes

Orchard Ovens is the domestic and commercial pizza oven supplier in the UK of Valoriani, based in Reggello, Tuscany - the manufacturer of Italy's hugely respected Valoriani pizza ovens, known as the Maserati of pizza ovens and the kings of clay. These ovens are made from superb refractory clay - cotto clay - found in the family's quarry and unique, thanks to having just the right alumina. This allows Valoriani ovens to heat up quickly and retain heat superbly, bring huge advantages to homeowners, as well as restaurant owners, hotels, pubs, mobile caterers, pizzerias, takeaways and more.

Orchard Ovens supplies some of Britain's best-known restaurants and chefs, whilst it is also a specialist creator of outdoor kitchens and wood-fired oven builds for the rich and famous, as well as everyday homeowners wishing to add value to their home and enjoy an outdoor lifestyle to the full.