Processing Your Payment

Please do not leave this page until complete. This can take a few moments.

Updated: March 24, 2025 Made in Maine

Made in Maine: A Skowhegan shop fires up wood-fired pizza ovens

Photo / Tim Greenway Scott Barden, co-owner of Maine Wood Heat, next to a Bigelow 120 oven at the Skowhegan facility
By Peter Van Allen

Wood-fired pizza has an almost cult-like following. But this isn’t a food review; it’s a story about the maker of wood-burning pizza ovens.

Pizza ovens of this kind produced at Maine Wood Heat in Skowhegan are a fixture at Maine Beer Co. in Freeport, Flight Decking Brewing and (now closed) Nomad Pizza in Brunswick, OTTO Pizza and other venues around Maine.

At the Maine Wood Heat factory in the Skowhegan Industrial Park, commercial ovens are the big-ticket items, selling for as much as $65,000. But owner Scott Barden and his team of four workers (and one administrator, his mom, Cheryl Kemper), also produce pizza ovens for home use. They’re pricey, as much as $13,000, but they’ve been sold to consumers as far afield as Connecticut, Ohio and Hawaii. The day Mainebiz visited, workers were polishing the copper dome of a pizza oven destined for a museum in Arizona.

Photo / Tim Greenway
Jason Farris welds a storage box door for a trailer.

The ovens are built from scratch. Many of the components are built or fabricated in-house, with a couple exceptions: the bottom of the oven, the bricks that retain and radiate heat, are imported from France. Copper sheathing that covers the dome part of the oven comes from a factory in Massachusetts and then is fabricated into the dome shape.

Steel framework components are produced in-house, as are the tin stove pipes. If the oven needs to be mobile, its trailer is produced in-house. The stoves are assembled by Barden and the small team.

Barden has the workshop outfitted for metal working, woodworking and fabrication, and the team is adept in different fields. The workshop is outfitted with old-school and new-school features: There’s a salvaged “acorn table” workbench that’s made from cast iron and looks like it could endure any amount of heat from a welding torch or pounding from a ball-pein hammer. There’s a large CNC machine acquired used from a factory in Illinois. There’s a heavy-duty miter saw for cutting steel. Nearly every tool is a much studier version of what you might see in a home workshop.

Photo / Tim Greenway
Garrett Veinotte welds on a ventilation pipe for a pizza oven.

Shift in strategy

The pandemic created a rush on home pizza ovens — both from Maine Wood Heat and also from cheaper competitors — but that business trailed off last year, as people returned to workplaces, Barden says.

“There was saturation in the market. A lot of people spent a lot of money in lockdown, in that stay-at-home period,” he says.

Barden is refocusing some of the business on the Maine Metalcraft division, which offers custom fences, signs, fixtures, truck bodies, manufacturing support and even intricate metal sculptures. New products are being developed.

He’s working with a branding firm on a rebrand to Maine Oven Craft. The retooled name would denote a higher-end product and clarify what the company does.

“The idea is to boost visibility,” Barden says. “The [Maine Wood Heat] name is confusing.”

Sign up for Enews

Mainebiz web partners

Most Recent

Most Recent

0 Comments

Order a PDF